Asteroids Essay -- essays research papers

Asteroids In our solar system today there are over 30,000 asteroids flying around in all direction colliding with other asteroids and planets, without a care about the destruction they might convey. Our planet Earth is caught right in the middle of all of this action and is liable to entire extinction of any life forms on the planet if a large enough asteroid crosses its path. Any single asteroid has the possibility to erase thousands of years of history and wipeout the human race, as we know it. Asteroids are large or small chunks of rock and metal flying around space up to speeds of 80 000 km/h. These chunks were believed to have formed millions of years ago during the "big bang". These rocks didn’t form any planets and were stuck floating around space on their own or in the gravitation of the asteroid belt. This asteroid belt is approximately 300 million miles from the Sun and it contains thousands of asteroids; some being miles in diameter. Another theory of the formation of asteroids is that a planet between Mars and Jupiter once existed and after many years it exploded into thousands of pieces that are still revolving around the sun in the form of an asteroid belt. Other asteroids are formed when large meteors collide with large asteroids creating more small ones. These meteors can also collide with planets breaking off chunks of the crust into space. Ceres is believed to be the biggest asteroid that was in space at one point in time. Ceres was believed to be 600 miles wide, making up 1/3 of the total mass of all asteroids. Ceres was the first asteroid discovered and was found in 1801. There are two main types of asteroids; the first dominates the outer part of the belt and are found to be rich in carbon, the second group are located in the inside of the belt and are found to be rich in minerals. The average temperature of the surface of an asteroid is approximately -73 degrees C. Many people don’t know that over 50,000 small asteroids called meteors hit the Earth every year. These meteors are the outside layer of larger asteroids that have been chipped off or are the surface of other planets that have detached from their positions when hit with larger asteroids. Asteroids sometimes align with Earth when meteors flying through space collide with other asteroids in the belt causing pieces to break off and head in all directions. ... ... wide and found within 8 million kilometers of Earth. It is very probable that a large asteroid will hit the Earth in the future because of the planet’s past experience with asteroid collisions. Scientists estimate that an asteroid more than 800 m in diameter hits the Earth every million years and a smaller one hits every century. An asteroid bigger than 1 km would mean the end of about 30% of the World’s population. This size of an asteroid would be the equivalent explosion to 2 million Hiroshima bombs. This explosion would cause destruction of all living creatures within a hundred mile radius as well as blocking off the Sun with dust and rock particles for weeks or even months. Asteroids are probably the deadliest force that our solar system can produce, one strike could put man back in the dark ages and would kill almost the entire population of our planet. It is for this reason that scientists should focus more on understanding asteroids and research more into the defense of our planet. At the moment we only know where a fraction of the asteroids out there are. The asteroid that could destroy our planet could only be a year away and we don’t even know it exists.