News

• Meteorite fell near the town of Kamargaon in Assam in the year 2015 .

• Studying this meteorite and its minerals – may give new clues about the Earth’s lower mantle.

Meteorite

• Meteoroids – space rocks that range in size from dust grains to small asteroids.
 Pieces of larger bodies that have been broken – from comets, asteroids, Moon and other planets.
 Rocky, metallic, or combinations of rock and metal.

• Meteors – meteoroids that enter Earth’s or another planet’s atmosphere, at high speed and burn up.

• Meteorite – if meteoroid survives its trip through the atmosphere and hits the ground.

Asteroids

• Rocky, airless remains – left
over from the early formation of our solar system – 4.6 billion years ago.

• Sometimes called minor planets

• Small, rocky objects that orbit the sun.

• Much smaller than planets. • Most of them live in the main asteroid belt.

• Trojans – asteroids that exist behind Jupiter.

• Near Earth Objects – Asteroids that come close
to Earth.

Main Asteroid belt

• Region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

• Contains between 1.1 and 1.9 million asteroids larger than 1 kilometer in diameter. • Reason for existence of such large numbers of rocky bodies
 Gravity of newly formed Jupiter – caused the small bodies to collide with one
another, fragmenting them.

Source of image – http://www.imo.net