What is Asteroids And How Dangerous It Is?

Asteroids are group small bodies that tend to revolve around the Sun. These small bodies can range up to the size of a pebble to a whole school, while some are ever in bigger. The biggest known asteroid is a dwarf planet namely Ceres which is about 500–600 km in diameter located in Asteroid belt. The asteroids are mainly rocky clumps that rather break into smaller ones or form bigger lumps with regular collisions. 

The asteroid belt is the largest collection of asteroids known in the solar system. It is situated between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The space between the asteroids ranges in kilometers and is very prone to collisions. The elastic collisions with lack of any external forces acting on them tend to drive lumps of rocks in random directions, which makes some asteroids to leave the belt and orbit in random paths around Sun. Very few collide with planets.

Asteroids are lumps of rock - or perhaps ice - or maybe solid metal - that were “leftover” at the formation of the solar system. Most of them are orbiting somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter - but there are others similar bodies (but not called asteroids) far *FAR* out from the sun in the “Kuiper belt”.

These objects are tumbling around in those orbits - sometimes bumping into each other - or being moved around by the changing gravitational fields of various planets as they orbit. That sometimes causes an asteroid to be knocked out of their nice tidy orbit and to start orbiting the sun in a way that can cause it to go closer or further than the asteroid/Kuiper belt.

These stray asteroids can (rarely) impact planets and moons - or crash into the sun. The asteroid can vary in size from something the size of a grain of sand all the way up to something the size of a small moon.

Small asteroids hit the Earth all the time and are not a problem. Larger ones either burn up and break apart in the upper atmosphere or hit the ground somewhere fairly harmlessly.

Very large ones, the size of a mountain or a small US state can cause serious problems - but they are quite rare. There are craters left behind by these impacts all over the Earth - but they aren’t always easy to see once eroded by wind and rain and covered in vegetation. The asteroid that impacted off the coast of Mexico in the time of the dinosaurs was the size of a medium-sized city(!) and the consequences of the resulting explosion were to wipe out a large fraction of the species living on Earth at the time.

Once an asteroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere, we call it a “Meteor” and if it hits the ground, we call it a “Meteorite”. These are really the exact same things - but back in history, we didn’t know that - so we have different words for different ways we observe them!

Illustrated By:-Steve Baker