Have you ever wondered what are asteroids? Here are five amazing facts about asteroids for kids.
Asteroids can be pretty small or really big. Asteroids range from just two metres in size all the way up to one thousand metres in size! And because they don’t have very much gravity there is nothing to make them a more uniform shape in the way that planets are usually quite ball-like!
Asteroids don’t have a lot of gravity or an atmosphere like planets, but they do share one thing with planets they can have moons! Even though they have very little gravitational pull, if a small enough rock comes close enough it will orbit the asteroid and become its very own moon.
They can also become moons! While asteroids are travelling around the sun they can sometimes get sucked into the gravitational pull of another planet, making it a moon!
Asteroids are the leftover bits and pieces from when the universe was being formed. As planets, stars and moons were forming the leftover rocks and debris kept travelling around the universe as asteroids!
The biggest ever asteroid we have found is almost 1000 metres wide and it is called Ceres! Can you guess when it was first discovered? It was way back in 1801, so not only is it the biggest it is also one of the very first asteroids ever discovered.
We hope you enjoyed learning more things about asteroids as much as we loved teaching you about them. Now that you know how majestic these rocks are, you can move on to learn about our solar system’s planets like: Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune.
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