Animations of solar system asteriods, comets, etc

Thanks to Earthfiles I came across this really awesome site that shows animations of the motions of all known objects within our solar system. Who knew it was so crowed out there?

Here's a taste of one of the animations. Don't be alarmed but all those green dots are asteroids!



The site is here:
cfa-www.harvard.edu...

Here are some quick links to the animations:
Inner Solar System
Middle Solar System
Outer Solar System
Near Earth Objects

Wow excellent site. I had no clue we had so many asteroids hangin out next to us.

Wow. I really had no idea that our sector was such a hub of activity. Thanks for the find

The funny thing is that, although space is chaulk full of debris, dust, asteroids, planets, and stars - the simple amount of SPACE there is so vast that it's really not crowded at all!

There's a lot of space in space.

Imagine that you left in a straight line off the earth, that you could travel at infinite speed, and you could survive the flight. Chances are that you won't hit anything for a long time. Sure there's lots out there, but it rarely comes close enough to each other to do anything.

Heck, galaxies pass through other galaxies all the time - but the process usually just means more pretty stars in the sky rather than stars crashing into each other.

Laugh if all the Asdroids just started heading for our Solar Sytem then we are doomed for sure

Originally posted by Galiega
Laugh if all the Asdroids just started heading for our Solar Sytem then we are doomed for sure

That's the thing, they ARE in our solar system! They lie in the asteroid belt, which is in between mars and Jupiter! But don't worry, as Yarium already said, space is really really big, so they are scattered very very far apart.

Kinda concerns me that a good 9 or 10 of the asteroids in this video passed right through the crosshairs that are earth...

cfa-www.harvard.edu...

Originally posted by UnMature
Kinda concerns me that a good 9 or 10 of the asteroids in this video passed right through the crosshairs that are earth...

The scale on that is so huge that it's nothing to worry about. It probably just means that the asteroids are coming with a Lunar Distance.

Has anyone actually thought what the asteroid belt was once, like the debris of a planet or something similar. Since no one was around at the beginning of time and space and yeah ok the big bang might of created something.

No one truly knows what A. If the asteroid belt was a solid planet or something before (if it was blown up), B. How gas giants, rock planets, moons/certain moons that can be planets (no law saying that a planet has to orbit the sun, could orbit a gas giant like Jupiter) can grow.

And yeah scientists can say that all this is load of nonsense, but thats the fun of it because nobody knows, people can guess that this,that and the next thing happened, but without being there at that time no one can say we are or not right.

[edit on 23/07/2010 by xxstarlightxx]