Out beyond Mars next lie what we have named the "asteroids." They occupy most of the space between Mars and Jupiter. Our best explanation of them is that they are the, fragments of a goodly-sized planet which once traveled a very elliptical orbit somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. It has been shown mathematically bv Roche that when a smaller body in the course of its travels happens to approach a larger body closer than 2.45 times the radius of the latter, the smaller body is unable to withstand the strain of the gravitational pull and bursts. This is what probably happened to the primordial planet tht once roamed between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroids are its fragments, just as we planets of the solar system are fragments of the ancestral Sun rent asunder when in the dim past some large star wandered in from outer space and passed too close to our Sun.
This critical distance, known as "Roche’s limit," when applied to the moons of our various planets might be expected to indicate whether any of them are likely to burst in the near future. It turns out that it will be some 50,000 millions of years yet before our Moon will be pulled in close enough to Earth to burst. One of Saturn’s moons, however, has already burst, and this accounts for its mysterious ring. Jupiter’s innermost satellite is getting perilously close to Roche’s critical distance. This innermost moon of Jupiter is now at a distance of 2.54 time Jupiter’s radius. It only has to move in to 2.45 times to burst, and after a few million years pass, Jupiter will have a ring just as Saturn has.
The fragments that we have named the asteroids are of every size from pebbles to bodies several hundred miles in diameter. The one we have named Ceres was discovered by Piazzi in 1801. She is 480 miles in diameter. Eros is another large fragment, and there are now known to be at least four that are of the order of 100 miles in diameter.
All of them would be classed as rocks or bowlders by us. They probably are not spherical, but instead jagged, rough fragments, since the shattering occurred after the planet had become solid. They are very cold indeed, being a long way from the Sun. They constitute a widely scattered cluster, and they follow orbits around the Sun which take them variously from r3/a to 13 years to complete.
One startling thing could conceivably be caused to happen by the asteroids. Two or three of the larger ones, which might be traveling at different velocities or following orbits that sometime might intersect, might come so close together as to burst the smaller and seriously deflect one or another of the larger ones. Were this deflection to cause the fragment to collide with Earth, the consequences would be disastrous to us. A bowlder measuring a hundred miles across, weighing many millions of tons, and traveling at a speed of several thousand miles an hour, striking the Earth, let us say, in the vicinity of Chicago would create a disturbance which would melt everything within a radius of 500 miles and create an earthquake such as cannot be imagined. Such cataclysms occur at infrequent intervals, as we humans regard intervals, but it is quite within the bounds of possibility that some of our descendants may pass through an experience of this kind. It would create floods, earthquakes, and storms which would make any storm we know about look very puny and inconsequential.
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