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| About the Asteroid Belt
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The Asteroid Belt is made up of large and small rocks and chunks of ice called Asteroids that were left over from the creation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. They are rocky objects with round or irregular shapes. Some are up to several hundred km across, but most are very small.
More than 100,000 asteroids lie in this belt between Mars and Jupiter. These asteroids lie in a location in the solar system where there seems to be a large gap in the spacing between the planets. Scientists think that this debris may be the remains of an early planet, which broke up early in the solar system. Many of the Asteroids have been given names.
The chances of an asteroid from here colliding with Earth are very small, but some do come close to us, like the asteroid Hermes which comes as close as 777,000 km.
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