Rocks in Space: Finding Asteroids in the Solar System

I came across a neat video on YouTube the other day, showing visually the discovery of all the asteroids found since 1970 up to the present.

In this video the Sun is at the center, with the inner planets (and occasionally Jupiter) seen rotating around it from a position above the plane of the solar system (so looking down on the Earth's North Pole). The planets aren't labeled, but it's easy to count outwards from the Sun to find Earth. At the start of the video in 1970 all of the 4,422 asteroids known at that point are marked with tiny dots. (It's best to watch on the highest resolution you can, otherwise they're hard to see.) As time unfolds, asteroid discoveries are marked with bright white dots, before fading to a fainter color. Yellow and red dots (I'm guessing) are asteroids that come close to Earth, or Near-Earth Objects (NEOs).

Later in the video you might notice asteroids in the same orbit as Jupiter. These are known as the Trojan asteroids. These asteroids orbit the Sun in roughly the same orbit as Jupiter, but 60° either ahead or behind of it. The name comes from the fact that early on the first few discovered were given names from the Trojan War (starting with 588 Achilles), and it was proposed to continue with the naming scheme and give them all such names. The naming scheme even extends to location: asteroids ahead of Jupiter are given names from the Greek side of the war, while those trailing it are given names from the Trojan side. (Though amusingly, there are two out-of-place names from before this particular convention was adopted: Patroclus is found among the Trojans, and Hektor among the Greeks.)

The term Trojan asteroid originally referred to just the asteroids in the orbit of Jupiter, but when other asteroids sharing similar orbits with other planets were found the term expanded to encompass them as well. Currently Trojan asteroids are known for Earth (1), Mars (7), Jupiter (6,000+), Uranus (1), and Neptune (13).

As for why Trojan asteroids are generally found around 60° in front of or behind the planets they share an orbit with, that has to do with gravity, the three-body problem, and Lagrange points, and really deserves a blog post to itself sometime.

And finally, while watching these nifty visualizations, just keep in mind the fact that sizes are not to scale. In reality, while it looks like the asteroid belt is a swirling maelstrom of space debris, there are typically millions of miles (or kilometers!) between any two asteroids. There may be a lot of rocks out there, but there's an even larger volume of space to hold them. A hui hou!

Saturn's Rings and the Earth-Moon Distance

A few weeks ago I happened to hear offhand that Saturn and its rings would fit nicely in the space between the Earth and Moon. Being the visual-oriented person I am, I decided to go ahead and make a picture to put them in perspective, and figured I'd share.

First of all, a quick primer on the nomenclature of Saturn's rings. The rings are labeled alphabetically in order of discovery, although the A, B, and C rings were all discovered basically at the same time and the decision to name them working outward in towards the planet was pretty much arbitrary.

Technically the F ring is too thin to be shown here; it's only about 30–500 km thick which means it's about 40–400 times thinner than shown here. The relative brightnesses of the rings is also only approximate; the G ring (and even D ring) are also fainter than shown here, and aren't visible to the naked eye. They were only discovered with photography from various interplanetary probes after 1979 (as was the F ring). The F ring is the outermost of the “discrete” rings; beyond it, the rings are diffuse and may have moons orbiting embedded within them.

The astute among you might have noticed that there is a distinct lack of an E ring in the above image. Don't worry, we'll come back to that. Anyway, let's see how these rings stack up against the average Earth-Moon distance:

With an average separation distance between them of about 358,000 km, we can see that the Earth and the Moon nicely frame Saturn and its main rings there. It also gives a good idea of the size of Saturn relative to Earth.

But what about that E ring I glossed over a paragraph ago? Turns out the E ring is outside the G ring and extremely large, but like the G ring it's also extremely faint and diffuse.

Anyway, here's the E ring in all its glory (I've left the Earth, Moon, and the line between them in place):

Yeah, the E ring's pretty wide (and again, it's so diffuse that it's not visible to the naked eye). Its outer edge is just within the orbit of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. As you can see (or maybe not), the E ring's diameter is around twice as large as the average Earth-Moon distance.

But believe it or not, that's not all of Saturn's rings! There are a few more ringlets between the G and E ring that are too thin to show here, but there's another ring outside the E ring that's even larger and even more diffuse. This ring was only discovered in October 2009, and is known as the Phoebe ring after Saturn's unusual moon Phoebe which orbits just outside of it in a retrograde orbit. Here it is, with the rest of the ring system for comparison:

Yep, that little disc in the center is the E ring we just saw in the last picture—with the inner ring system and Saturn within that. This ring is really large. In fact, unlike the other rings which have a maximum thickness on the order of tens to maybe hundreds of meters, the Phoebe ring has a thickness around forty times greater than the radius of Saturn itself. In other words, this ring is thicker than the entire diameter of the E ring.

So there you have it! Saturn and its fascinating ring system, and how it compares to the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Hope you found it as interesting as I did putting these images together. A hui hou!