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The asteroid belt is a circumstellar disc in the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets. The asteroid belt is also termed the main asteroid belt or main belt to distinguish it from other asteroid populations in the Solar System such as near-Earth asteroids and trojan asteroids. About half the mass of the belt is contained in the four largest asteroids: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. The total mass of the asteroid belt is approximately 4% that of the Moon, which is significantly less than that of Pluto and roughly twice that of Pluto's moon Charon (whose diameter is 1200 km). Ceres, the asteroid belt's only dwarf planet, is about 950 km in diameter, whereas Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea have mean diameters of less than 600 km.〔〔 The remaining bodies range down to the size of a dust particle. The asteroid material is so thinly distributed that numerous unmanned spacecraft have traversed it without incident. Nonetheless, collisions between large asteroids do occur, and these can form an asteroid family whose members have similar orbital characteristics and compositions. Individual asteroids within the asteroid belt are categorized by their spectra, with most falling into three basic groups: carbonaceous (C-type), silicate (S-type), and metal-rich (M-type). The asteroid belt formed from the primordial solar nebula as a group of planetesimals, the smaller precursors of the planets, which in turn formed protoplanets. Between Mars and Jupiter, however, gravitational perturbations from Jupiter imbued the protoplanets with too much orbital energy for them to accrete into a planet. Collisions became too violent, and instead of fusing together, the planetesimals and most of the protoplanets shattered. As a result, 99.9% of the asteroid belt's original mass was lost in the first 100 million years of the Solar System's history. Some fragments eventually found their way into the inner Solar System, leading to meteorite impacts with the inner planets. Asteroid orbits continue to be appreciably perturbed whenever their period of revolution about the Sun forms an orbital resonance with Jupiter. At these orbital distances, a Kirkwood gap occurs as they are swept into other orbits. Classes of small Solar System bodies in other regions are the near-Earth objects, the centaurs, the Kuiper belt objects, the scattered disc objects, the sednoids, and the Oort cloud objects. On 22 January 2014, ESA scientists reported the detection, for the first definitive time, of water vapor on Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. The detection was made by using the far-infrared abilities of the Herschel Space Observatory. The finding was unexpected because comets, not asteroids, are typically considered to "sprout jets and plumes". According to one of the scientists, "The lines are becoming more and more blurred between comets and asteroids."〔 ==History of observation== In an anonymous footnote to his 1766 translation of Charles Bonnet's ''Contemplation de la Nature'', the astronomer Johann Daniel Titius of Wittenberg noted an apparent pattern in the layout of the planets. If one began a numerical sequence at 0, then included 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, etc., doubling each time, and added four to each number and divided by 10, this produced a remarkably close approximation to the radii of the orbits of the known planets as measured in astronomical units. This pattern, now known as the Titius–Bode law, predicted the semi-major axes of the six planets of the time (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) provided one allowed for a "gap" between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. In his footnote Titius declared, "But should the Lord Architect have left that space empty? Not at all."〔 In 1768, the astronomer Johann Elert Bode made note of Titius's relationship in his ''Anleitung zur Kenntniss des gestirnten Himmels'' (English: ''Instruction for the Knowledge of the Starry Heavens'') but did not credit Titius until later editions. It became known as "Bode's law".〔 When William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, the planet's orbit matched the law almost perfectly, leading astronomers to conclude that there had to be a planet between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. In 1800 the astronomer Baron Franz Xaver von Zach recruited 24 of his fellows into a club, the Vereinigte Astronomische Gesellschaft ("United Astronomical Society") which he informally dubbed the "Lilienthal Society"〔Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, ''Asteroids, Meteorites, and Comets'', 2010:10〕 for its meetings in Lilienthal, a small city near Bremen. Determined to bring the Solar System to order, the group became known as the "Himmelspolizei", or Celestial Police. Notable members included Herschel, the British astronomer royal, Nevil Maskelyne, Charles Messier, and Heinrich Olbers. The society assigned to each astronomer a 15° region of the zodiac to search for the missing planet. Only a few months later, a non-member of the Celestial Police confirmed their expectations. On January 1, 1801, Giuseppe Piazzi, chair of astronomy at the University of Palermo, Sicily, found a tiny moving object in an orbit with exactly the radius predicted by the Titius–Bode law. He dubbed it "Ceres", after the Roman goddess of the harvest and patron of Sicily. Piazzi initially believed it to be a comet, but its lack of a coma suggested it was a planet.〔 Fifteen months later, Olbers discovered a second object in the same region, Pallas. Unlike the other known planets, the objects remained points of light even under the highest telescope magnifications instead of resolving into discs. Apart from their rapid movement, they appeared indistinguishable from stars. Accordingly, in 1802, William Herschel suggested they be placed into a separate category, named "asteroids", after the Greek ''asteroeides'', meaning "star-like". Upon completing a series of observations of Ceres and Pallas, he concluded,〔 〕
Despite Herschel's coinage, for several decades it remained common practice to refer to these objects as planets.〔 By 1807, further investigation revealed two new objects in the region: 3 Juno and 4 Vesta.〔 〕 The burning of Lilienthal in the Napoleonic wars brought this first period of discovery to a close,〔 and only in 1845 did astronomers detect another object (5 Astraea). Shortly thereafter, new objects were found at an accelerating rate, and counting them among the planets became increasingly cumbersome. Eventually, they were dropped from the planet list as first suggested by Alexander von Humboldt in the early 1850s, and Herschel's choice of nomenclature, "asteroids", gradually came into common use.〔 The discovery of Neptune in 1846 led to the discrediting of the Titius–Bode law in the eyes of scientists, because its orbit was nowhere near the predicted position. To date, there is no scientific explanation for the law, and astronomers' consensus regards it as a coincidence.〔(【引用サイトリンク】work=astronomy.com ) 〕 The expression "asteroid belt" came into use in the very early 1850s, although it is hard to pinpoint who coined the term. The first English use seems to be in the 1850 translation (by E. C. Otté) of Alexander von Humboldt's ''Cosmos'': "() and the regular appearance, about the 13th of November and the 11th of August, of shooting stars, which probably form part of a belt of asteroids intersecting the Earth's orbit and moving with planetary velocity". Other early appearances occur in Robert James Mann's ''A Guide to the Knowledge of the Heavens'',〔 and 1853, p. 216〕 "The orbits of the asteroids are placed in a wide belt of space, extending between the extremes of ()". The American astronomer Benjamin Peirce seems to have adopted that terminology and to have been one of its promoters.〔: "(Peirce ) then observed that the analogy between the ring of Saturn and the belt of the asteroids was worthy of notice."〕 One hundred asteroids had been located by mid-1868, and in 1891 the introduction of astrophotography by Max Wolf accelerated the rate of discovery still further. A total of 1,000 asteroids had been found by 1921, 10,000 by 1981, and 100,000 by 2000.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 publisher=IAU Minor Planet Center )〕 Modern asteroid survey systems now use automated means to locate new minor planets in ever-increasing quantities. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Asteroid belt」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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