What causes the Kirkwood gaps quizlet?
The Kirkwood gaps are spaces in the asteroid belt where orbital resonance with Jupiter has removed asteroids. All of these gaps are caused by resonance effects in which an extra gravitational pull is applied periodically to an orbiting object so that, eventually, it is ejected from the ring.
What are the Kirkwood gaps of the asteroid belt and what causes them?
Kirkwood gaps are gaps in the distribution of asteroid orbital periods. These gaps occur and simple fractions (e.g. 1/2, 1/3, etc) of Jupiter’s orbital period. Kirkwood gaps are caused by the gravitational interaction between Jupiter and asteriods with these periods.
What is a Hirayama family of asteroids quizlet?
What is a Hirayama family of asteroids? group of asteroids that have identical orbits.
What happened to the impactor of the Deep Impact mission quizlet?
What happened to the “Impactor” of the Deep Impact mission? It created a small crater on the comet. Comets with extremely elliptical orbits, like comets Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp, come from the Oort cloud.
Where is Kirkwood gaps located?
Fig. 12.3 . Most of the asteroids are found in the asteroid belt that lies between 2.2 and 3.3 AU from the Sun, but here are very few asteroids at certain distances from the Sun.
What causes the gaps observed in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter?
What causes the “gaps” observed in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter? Jupiter’s gravity causes orbital resonances that nudge asteroids out of these areas.
What do Kirkwood gaps represent?
The Kirkwood gaps are the primal source of near-Earth asteroids. Collisions between asteroids have their orbits perturbed by the Yarkovsky effect, and as such, they drift into the Kirkwood gaps. Because of the Kirkwood gaps, some asteroids might completely exit the solar system.
Where are Kirkwood gaps?
A Kirkwood gap is a gap or dip in the distribution of the semi-major axes (or equivalently of the orbital periods) of the orbits of main-belt asteroids. They correspond to the locations of orbital resonances with Jupiter.
What are short period comets and long period comets?
Short-period comets take less than 200 years, and long-period comets take over 200 years, with some taking 100,000 to 1 million years to orbit the Sun. The short-period comets are found near the ecliptic, which means they are orbiting the Sun in same plane as the planets.
Why does no major planet orbit the Sun at the location of the asteroid belt quizlet?
space debris left over after the formation of the planets. Why does no major planet orbit the Sun at the location of the asteroid belt? Jupiter’s gravitational pull prevented the planetesimals in this region from coalescing into a single, large object.
What do astronomers mean when they refer to gaps?
6) Why do asteroids and comets differ in composition? 8) What do astronomers mean when they refer to “gaps” in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter? C) Asteroids seem to avoid certain orbits around the Sun, creating “gaps” in the orbits that asteroids can have. 9) Where are the Trojan asteroids located?
