Asteroids are small heavenly bodies that are also called minor planets and which revolve around the sun in the orbit of the giant gas planet Jupiter. There are also near earth asteroids but the vast majority of asteroids are found circling the Jupiter in the inner sun orbit. Astronomer Scott Manley has made an animation depicting how the numbers of these asteroids has been steadily increasing over the period of past three decades. Stanley made use of the data available from Asteroid Orbital Elements Database and created a video in which one can see how the solar system has become overcrowded with the discovery of every new asteroid in the last thirty years, specifically from 1980.
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The animation video marks every asteroid that has been discovered with a colored spot and places it inside the picture to show how the inner solar system is becoming overcrowded with these asteroids. Though it is a little terrifying to see these heavenly bodies moving in their orbits around the sun so close to each other, Stanley says that there is nothing to worry as these asteroids are still quite a large distance apart from one another, at least a 500 thousand kilometers to start with. These asteroids have been color coded and placed into different categories according to whether they are earth crossers (Red), earth approachers (Yellow), or have nothing to do with earth (Green). They are initially marked as white when they are discovered but their color changes according to their distance and movement. The video is quite fast and moves at the rate of 60 days per second. There is also a date counter on the lower left side of the video to let you know the date on which a particular asteroid was discovered by the scientists. Another counter that moves very quickly adds on the number of the asteroids discovered and stops when the video ends at a staggering number of nearly half a million of these asteroids in the solar system.
The numbers of asteroid discovered in the decade of 80’s was slow until the modern instruments that were electronic
and digital in nature arrived to speed up this process. The picture that is made of sporadic dots here and there gets filled by these colored dots quickly and by the time 2012 arrives in this 3 minute video, the number counter shows nearly 500000 asteroids discovered in the solar system.
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Though the video looks scary with the dots finally becoming a solid belt, there is nothing to worry for us human beings as despite occasional collisions, these heavenly bodies are quite a distance apart from each other. These distances are astronomical in nature that are so large that even if you were to sand on a particular asteroid, you would not be able to see another or the closes one around the one you are standing upon. But the rate of discovery of asteroids does pose problems for the future of our planet.
