Besides, the nine planets that orbit the sun, there are several thousand minor planets. Asteroids orbit the sun in a belt between Jupiter and Mars. They range in size, from small to hundreds of miles wide. In fact, Ida, an iron and stone chunk of an asteroid is thirty-two miles long.

There are two possibilities of the asteroids' origin. When the solar system was forming from the dust and pieces that floated around, the asteroids were the left over bits and pieces of the puzzle that never got to be put together to form a planet like the others. It is also possible that these asteroids broke off from a mother planet, or exist as the remnants of a mother planet that once stood as the fifth planet in our solar system. Perhaps, Mars attacked. The placement of the theoretical mother planet would explain the existence of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Of course, these are only creative theories. We still do not know the origin of the asteroids that roam around our solar system.

However way the asteroids were formed, 4.6 billion years ago when the solar system was a newborn baby, the asteroids had metallic cores that consisted of stone and iron surfaces. The asteroids underwent collisions, which made them break apart. Now there are iron asteroids, stony asteroids, and stony-iron asteroids.

Since the asteroids have been broken apart already, they now form smaller bits when colliding. Collisions form these small fragments which become meteors when they move toward the Earth. The pieces that actually pass Earth's atmosphere and hit planet Earth are called meteorites. Iron meteorites are composed of only 0.6% cobalt and 8.5% nickel. The remaining 91% is the iron composition of the meteorite form. The stony meteorite has 26% iron, 14% magnesium, 1.4% nickel, 1.3% calcium, 1.5% aluminum, 36% iron, and 18% silicon. Meteorites have scared some people. A theory of dinosaur destruction has been influenced by the possible dangers of a meteorite. It would take a meteorite that is greater than a quarter of a mile wide for a "Nuclear Winter". So hopefully, we will not see too much of Ida's 32 miles around Earth.