• Question: how many astroids per minute

    Asked by pie pie to Chris, Hayley, Jimi on 17 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Jimi Wills

      Jimi Wills answered on 17 Mar 2016:

      Complicated:

      on average…
      our asteroid belt is 3.2 au from the sun which is 3.2 x 150 million kilometres
      or 480 million km

      the asteroids on average travel about 25km per second. and there are someting like 2 millions large asteroids… let’s assume the same of smaller ones, so 4 million asteroids travelling at 25 km per second. How spread out are they?

      The distance they are spread over is 2 x PI x 480 million km = 3 trillion km

      So : 3 trillion / 4 million = 750 km between each asteroid.

      They are travelling at 25km persecond, so will take 750 / 25 = 30 seconds between them.

      So 2 asteroids per minute!

    • Photo: Hayley Moulding

      Hayley Moulding answered on 17 Mar 2016:

      Too many to count!! There are a lot of different meteor showers everyday that we don’t know about and there are many asteroids will travel very close to the Earth too.

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