BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy 100,000 Asteroids - Painted Stone

Here is an animation called "Painted Stone". It represents 100,000 asteroids shown in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). You can see the orbits, relative sizes and colors. But . . . warning. The asteroids wouldn't look these bright colors if you could actually see them. However the SDSS five-color camera was able to pick up subtle gradations in color that reflect what the asteroid is made of.

It would make quite a hypnotic screen saver.

There's a new "Cosmos" TV series, with Neil deGrasse Tyson taking over from Carl Sagan's original series. Surprisingly, the asteroid belt was shown as densely-populated. A NASA artist's impression of the asteroid belt also gives the wrong impression.

Even with 800 trillion asteroids bigger than a meter, you could hardly call the asteroid belt crowded. The amount of space in it is about 50 trillion trillion cubic km, giving each asteroid an average billions of cubic km of space. "In fact," as Brian Koberlein says, “to get even close to an asteroid takes a great deal of effort.”

Based on observations by South American telescopes, the asteroid Chariklo has two narrow rings circling it . This is amazing, as no one expected to find anything like that on such a small object. The other four ringed bodies known in the Solar System are the giant outer planets. The rings could have been created from the debris of a collision.