What is the asteroid belt?

A wide ring of leftover rocky rubble between Mars and Jupiter — and mostly empty space.

Can you see it?

Not as one thing, no — the asteroid belt is a place rather than a sight: a wide ring of small bodies going round the Sun, well beyond the Earth’s path. What you go out and look at are the things in it, one at a time.

Worth knowing about the asteroid belt

Why it stands out: Average distance between large asteroids: about 1 million km.
What it is like: Millions of rocky and metallic chunks, from tiny pebbles up to the dwarf planet Ceres.
How it moves: Most main-belt asteroids take 3 to 6 years to orbit the Sun once.
The machines we sent: NASA’s Dawn spacecraft visited Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres between 2011 and 2018.

The numbers

Distance from the Sun	roughly 2.2 to 3.2 AU

How anyone knows this

Show the asteroid belt in the model ☀️ Everything the Sun holds 🌙 Plan an evening outside