Asteroids: Crash Course Astronomy #20
Now that we've finished our tour of the planets, we're headed back to the asteroid belt. Asteroids are chunks of rock, metal, or both that were once part of smallish planets but were destroyed...
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When you look at a diagram of the solar system, you’ll see a big gap between Mars and Jupiter. A few centuries ago, that gap bugged astronomers; they really wanted there to be a planet in there. On the first day of the 19th century—January 1, 1801—they got their wish. Kinda. Italian astronomer Giuseppi Piazzi found a point of light moving at just the right speed to be the desired planet, but it was just a dot, and too faint to physically be a terribly big object. He suspected it might be a comet, but follow-up observations showed it wasn’t fuzzy. The object was given the name Ceres… but was it really a planet? Well... Hopes were high that Ceres was the wished-for planet between Mars and Jupiter. But then something rather amazing happened: A litt...
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When you look at a diagram of the solar system, you’ll see a big gap between Mars and Jupiter. A few centuries ago, that gap bugged astronomers; they really wanted there to be a planet in there. On the first day of the 19th century—January 1, 1801—they got their wish. Kinda. Italian astronomer Giuseppi Piazzi found a point of light moving at just the right speed to be the desired planet, but it was just a dot, and too faint to physically be a terribly big object. He suspected it might be a comet, but follow-up observations showed it wasn’t fuzzy. The object was given the name Ceres… but was it really a planet? Well... Hopes were high that Ceres was the wished-for planet between Mars and Jupiter. But then something rather amazing happened: A litt...
