The waning Moon anchors a beautiful lineup in tomorrow’s early-morning sky. At dawn, the star Regulus – the heart of the lion – is close above the Moon. The brilliant planet Jupiter is to the upper right of the Moon, with Mars a little farther along the same line.
Mars and Jupiter are the fourth and fifth planets from the Sun, with Jupiter about three times farther out. The gap between them is more than 300 million miles. But that space is far from empty. Instead, it’s home to the asteroid belt – a wide band of debris.
So far, astronomers have cataloged about one-and-a-half million objects in the belt. The largest is about 600 miles across. The smallest are about the size of a bus. But the suspected population is far larger. There could be more than a million that are at least one kilometer in diameter, and millions upon millions of smaller ones.
Current theories say the belt probably is debris from a planet that never was. Many of the solid chunks of material that came together to form the planets inhabited the region when the solar system was young. Left on their own, they might have come together to make a planet. But Jupiter’s gravity kept that from happening. It kicked many of the pieces out of the solar system. And it stirred up the others, preventing them from coalescing – filling the space between Mars and Jupiter with a bunch of leftovers from the birth of the planets.
Script by Damond Benningfield
