Many asteroids also contain organic compounds, and even long-chain amino-acids. Consisting mainly of metallic asteroids, but also any that do not fit into ‘C’ or ‘S’ categories.
Stony asteroids mainly consisting of silicate minerals. Chapman, David Morrison and Ben Zellner, asteroids are now classified mainly into one of the following classifications:Ĭ-type. By studying these orbits, an asteroid’s density can be determined by calculating the mass that would be required to hold these bodies in its orbit.įollowing the development of these means of determining an asteroid’s composition, a system developed in 1975 by Clark R. Some asteroids have moons themselves, other asteroids or smaller bodies that orbit them. Spectroscopy can determine the surface composition from these emissions.ģ.
Individual elements emit specific and unique electromagnetic radiation. The reflective brightness of the surface.Ģ. The term asteroid has generally now been limited to those in the inner solar system, out to the orbit of Jupiter, and in astronomy circles the actual preferred term, particularly for the larger asteroids, Trojans and Centaurs, is ‘minor planets’.Īstronomers are able to determine the composition of asteroids using three main sources:ġ. There are larger asteroid types that share the same orbital path as Jupiter, the ‘Jupiter Trojans’, although the larger of these Trojans, some of which share orbits with other planets, and another class of minor solar system body called ‘Centaurs’ also have some of the characteristics of comets, and so are distinguished and defined further in their own groups. The majority of asteroids are found orbiting the Sun in the ‘asteroid belt’ that lies between Mars and Jupiter, but there are other regions or groupings of asteroids that are also significant in number, including ‘near-Earth asteroids’ and other groups that share orbits with the other major planets. There are many millions of individual asteroids in our solar system.
These rocky/ice and metallic bodies, mainly irregular in shape, are those that orbit the Sun as the planets do, but never became planets themselves. Asteroids, the larger of which are sometimes termed planetoids, are in essence the remnants of the many collisions that took place during the formation of the solar system we see today.