There is compelling evidence that nearly all meteoroids that reach the ground and can be studied as meteorites are derived from the asteroid belt. Ideally, scientists would like to know which asteroids are the sources of particular types of meteorites and the mechanisms by which meteorites are transported from the asteroid belt to Earth. The question of which meteorites came from which asteroids has only begun to be answered with exploration of asteroids by spacecraft. For example, the Dawn spacecraft identified the HED meteorites as originating from the asteroid Vesta. Nevertheless, there is considerable information about how they got to Earth.

Hundreds of thousands of asteroids have been identified orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, although there may be more than a million such objects greater than 1 km across and many more smaller ones. These bodies have orbital eccentricities and inclinations great enough that they collide with one another at velocities averaging about 5 km per second. Because of this, few asteroids larger than about 75 km in diameter have survived collisional destruction over the entire history of the solar system. The present-day smaller asteroids consist of debris formed by the fragmentation of larger asteroids that is caused by this natural grinding process. The grinding extends down through yet smaller meteoroidal bodies to fine dust.

The length of time that meteoroids spent in space as small meteoroids (a few metres across or less) can be estimated from the effect of their exposure to high-energy cosmic rays in the space environment (see meteorite: Cosmic-ray exposure ages of meteorites). For chondritic meteorites, there are significantly fewer older ones than younger ones. Most ordinary chondrites have exposure ages of less than 50 million years and most carbonaceous chondrites less than 20 million years. Achondrites, another stony type, have ages that cluster between 20 and 30 million years. Iron meteorites have a much broader range of exposure ages; some are between one and two billion years old. To some extent the ranges of exposure ages reflect the time it takes for meteoroid orbits to become Earth-crossing, but for the most part they are determined by collisional lifetimes, the characteristic time a meteoroid can exist before suffering a catastrophic collision. For most meteorite types, the time it takes for approximately half of a population to be eliminated by collisions is about 5–10 million years. The longer exposure ages of iron meteorites suggest that their greater strength allows them to survive longer in space.

Only two processes are known that can put meteoroidal fragments into Earth-crossing orbits on the short timescales indicated by their cosmic-ray exposure ages. These processes are direct collisional ejection from the asteroid belt and gravitational acceleration by dynamic resonances with the planets. As mentioned above, collisions at velocities of 5 km per second are relatively common in the asteroid belt. In such a collision, some material is ejected at the velocity needed to put it into an Earth-crossing orbit, but the quantity is small, and most of it is pulverized by the associated shock pressures. High-velocity ejection is the likely explanation for those meteorites determined to have come from Mars or the Moon, but it completely fails to provide the observed quantity of meteorites from the asteroid belt.

Resonance mechanisms are believed to be of much greater importance in sending material toward Earth. These resonances efficiently expel material from the belt, producing regions in which the asteroid population is depleted. Such regions are known as Kirkwood gaps after their discoverer, the 19th-century American astronomer Daniel Kirkwood (see asteroid: Distribution and Kirkwood gaps). One of the most prominent of these gaps lies at a distance of about 2.5 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. (One astronomical unit is the average distance from Earth to the Sun—about 150 million km [93 million miles].) An asteroidal fragment orbiting the Sun near 2.5 AU completes three revolutions in the time that Jupiter, the most massive planet in the solar system and a strong source of gravitational perturbations, executes one revolution. It is thus said to be in a 3:1 resonance with the planet. The regular nudges resulting from the resonance cause the orbit of the asteroidal fragment to become chaotic, and its perihelion (the point of its orbit nearest the Sun) becomes shifted inside Earth’s orbit over a period of about one million years. Numerical simulations on computers support the idea that the 3:1 resonance is one of the principal mechanisms that inject asteroidal material into ultimately Earth-crossing orbits.

If gravitational resonance with Jupiter is an efficient mechanism for removing material from the asteroid belt, one might expect the region close to a strong resonance to be cleared of material over the lifetime of the solar system so that by now nothing would be left to send into Earth-crossing orbits. A number of processes, however, cause asteroids to migrate within the asteroid belt, thereby maintaining a constant supply of material to the resonances.

Meteoroids less than a few hundred micrometres across—i.e., interplanetary dust particles—come to Earth from the asteroid belt via a rather different mechanism than the larger ones. Interaction with solar radiation causes them to spiral into Earth-crossing orbits from the asteroid belt through a process called Poynting-Robertson drag. The time it takes a particle to traverse the distance from the asteroid belt to Earth depends inversely on its radius and where in the asteroid belt it started out. For 10–50-μm dust particles, traverse time is calculated to be about 100,000 years. (Particles that are much smaller than a micrometre are actually blown out of the solar system by radiation pressure from the Sun.) Estimates of cosmic-ray exposure ages for micrometeoroids collected on Earth are broadly consistent with their traverse times calculated from the Poynting-Robertson drag process. In principle, some dust particles could be much younger than the calculated traverse times, either because they were produced in collisions of larger Earth-crossing objects or because they are not asteroidal in origin but rather have been shed by comets during comparatively recent passages through the inner solar system.

Conel M.O'D. Alexander George W. Wetherill
Also called:
minor planet
Or:
planetoid

asteroid, any of a host of small bodies, about 1,000 km (600 miles) or less in diameter, that orbit the Sun primarily between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter in a nearly flat ring called the asteroid belt. It is because of their small size and large numbers relative to the major planets that asteroids are also called minor planets. The two designations have been used interchangeably, though the term asteroid is more widely recognized by the general public. Among scientists, those who study individual objects with dynamically interesting orbits or groups of objects with similar orbital characteristics generally use the term minor planet, whereas those who study the physical properties of such objects usually refer to them as asteroids. The distinction between asteroids and meteoroids having the same origin is culturally imposed and is basically one of size. Asteroids that are approximately house-sized (a few tens of metres across) and smaller are often called meteoroids, though the choice may depend somewhat on context—for example, whether they are considered objects orbiting in space (asteroids) or objects having the potential to collide with a planet, natural satellite, or other comparatively large body or with a spacecraft (meteoroids).

Major milestones in asteroid research

Early discoveries

The first asteroid was discovered on January 1, 1801, by the astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi at Palermo, Italy. At first Piazzi thought he had discovered a comet; however, after the orbital elements of the object had been computed, it became clear that the object moved in a planetlike orbit between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Because of illness, Piazzi was able to observe the object only until February 11. Although the discovery was reported in the press, Piazzi only shared details of his observations with a few astronomers and did not publish a complete set of his observations until months later. With the mathematics then available, the short arc of observations did not allow computation of an orbit of sufficient accuracy to predict where the object would reappear when it moved back into the night sky, so some astronomers did not believe in the discovery at all.

There matters might have stood had it not been for the fact that that object was located at the heliocentric distance predicted by Bode’s law of planetary distances, proposed in 1766 by the German astronomer Johann D. Titius and popularized by his compatriot Johann E. Bode, who used the scheme to advance the notion of a “missing” planet between Mars and Jupiter. The discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781 by the British astronomer William Herschel at a distance that closely fit the distance predicted by Bode’s law was taken as strong evidence of its correctness. Some astronomers were so convinced that they agreed during an astronomical conference in 1800 to undertake a systematic search. Ironically, Piazzi was not a party to that attempt to locate the missing planet. Nonetheless, Bode and others, on the basis of the preliminary orbit, believed that Piazzi had found and then lost it. That led German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss to develop in 1801 a method for computing the orbit of minor planets from only a few observations, a technique that has not been significantly improved since. The orbital elements computed by Gauss showed that, indeed, the object moved in a planetlike orbit between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Using Gauss’s predictions, German Hungarian astronomer Franz von Zach (ironically, the one who had proposed making a systematic search for the “missing” planet) rediscovered Piazzi’s object on December 7, 1801. (It was also rediscovered independently by German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers on January 2, 1802.) Piazzi named that object Ceres after the ancient Roman grain goddess and patron goddess of Sicily, thereby initiating a tradition that continues to the present day: asteroids are named by their discoverers (in contrast to comets, which are named for their discoverers).

The discovery of three more faint objects in similar orbits over the next six years—Pallas, Juno, and Vesta—complicated that elegant solution to the missing-planet problem and gave rise to the surprisingly long-lived though no longer accepted idea that the asteroids were remnants of a planet that had exploded.

Following that flurry of activity, the search for the planet appears to have been abandoned until 1830, when Karl L. Hencke renewed it. In 1845 he discovered a fifth asteroid, which he named Astraea.

The orbits of the planets and other elements of the solar system, including asteroids, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, comet
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The name asteroid (Greek for “starlike”) had been suggested to Herschel by classicist Charles Burney, Jr., via his father, music historian Charles Burney, Sr., who was a close friend of Herschel’s. Herschel proposed the term in 1802 at a meeting of the Royal Society. However, it was not accepted until the mid-19th century, when it became clear that Ceres and the other asteroids were not planets.

There were 88 known asteroids by 1866, when the next major discovery was made: Daniel Kirkwood, an American astronomer, noted that there were gaps (now known as Kirkwood gaps) in the distribution of asteroid distances from the Sun (see below Distribution and Kirkwood gaps). The introduction of photography to the search for new asteroids in 1891, by which time 322 asteroids had been identified, accelerated the discovery rate. The asteroid designated (323) Brucia, detected in 1891, was the first to be discovered by means of photography. By the end of the 19th century, 464 had been found, and that number grew to 108,066 by the end of the 20th century and more than 1,000,000 in the third decade of the 21st century. The explosive growth was a spin-off of a survey designed to find 90 percent of asteroids with diameters greater than one kilometre that can cross Earth’s orbit and thus have the potential to collide with the planet (see below Near-Earth asteroids).

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Later advances

In 1918 the Japanese astronomer Hirayama Kiyotsugu recognized clustering in three of the orbital elements (semimajor axis, eccentricity, and inclination) of various asteroids. He speculated that objects sharing those elements had been formed by explosions of larger parent asteroids, and he called such groups of asteroids “families.”

In the mid-20th century, astronomers began to consider the idea that, during the formation of the solar system, Jupiter was responsible for interrupting the accretion of a planet from a swarm of planetesimals located about 2.8 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun; for elaboration of this idea, see below Origin and evolution of the asteroids. (One astronomical unit is the average distance from Earth to the Sun—about 150 million km [93 million miles].) About the same time, calculations of the lifetimes of asteroids whose orbits passed close to those of the major planets showed that most such asteroids were destined either to collide with a planet or to be ejected from the solar system on timescales of a few hundred thousand to a few million years. Since the age of the solar system is approximately 4.6 billion years, this meant that the asteroids seen today in such orbits must have entered them recently and implied that there was a source for those asteroids. At first that source was thought to be comets that had been captured by the planets and that had lost their volatile material through repeated passages inside the orbit of Mars. It is now known that most such objects come from regions in the main asteroid belt near Kirkwood gaps and other orbital resonances.

During much of the 19th century, most discoveries concerning asteroids were based on studies of their orbits. The vast majority of knowledge about the physical characteristics of asteroids—for example, their size, shape, rotation period, composition, mass, and density—was learned beginning in the 20th century, in particular since the 1970s. As a result of such studies, those objects went from being merely “minor” planets to becoming small worlds in their own right. The discussion below follows that progression in knowledge, focusing first on asteroids as orbiting bodies and then on their physical nature.