What Are Asteroids And Meteors And Details Information

By Author: Souvik Roy
Total Articles: 4
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Origin of Asteroids and Meteors

Millions of asteroids orbit the sun, usually in a belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. A few brush past the planet Earth. Generally larger than comets and meteors, asteroids are chunks of rock and metal that can range from 100 yards to almost 600 miles in width. Comets sometimes likened to big, dirty snowballs, are made of rock, ice, dust, carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases. They originate
in the Kuiper belt. As comets journey toward the sun, they begin to de-frost. Solar heat vaporizes ice, which forms a halo of gas and dust, called a coma, around the comet’s nucleus. Approaching Mars, comets may form tails, some hundreds of millions of miles long. Meteors, more commonly seen from Earth than asteroids or comets, are known to most as shooting stars, but they are actually not stars at all.
WILL AN ASTEROID HIT SOON?

If an asteroid hit Earth, its effect on our planet would depend upon its size. Earth’s atmosphere usually protects the planet from asteroids less than 150 feet in diameter. Objects up to 3,000 feet across create intense, localized ...
... damage. Such impacts occur every few centuries. Asteroids more than 5,000 feet
across would kick up dust and cause an “impact winter.” Such hits occur once or twice every million years. The Chicxulub crater in Mexico was probably the result of an asteroid impact 65 million years ago. The dust produced may have caused a climate change that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
To date, astronomers have cataloged some 1,541 potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAS), though none are believed to be on a collision course with Earth.
VARIATIONS ON THE METEOR
Meteoroids, meteors, and meteorites all represent different stages of inter- planetary debris. Meteoroids are small chunks of rock and metal-pieces of asteroids, bits of comets, and, rarely, pieces of the moon or Mars-that or- bit the sun. Earth’s gravity sweeps up
millions of meteoroids. Most of them vaporize in our atmosphere, leaving a visible trail of glowing dust we call a meteor or shooting star. Meteorites are meteors that make it through Earth’s atmosphere and reach the ground.
Meteors appear on a regular basis in the night sky, but they also occur with great reliability in large numbers at certain times of the year. Known as meteor showers, they are often named for the background constellations against which they appear during a particular period of time.

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