Other Members of the Solar System

Images courtesy of NASA

In the Solar System, some of the smallest objects are also the most plentiful. Asteroids are the largest of these rocky bodies and scientists monitor their activity to observe any potential impact to planet Earth. Meteoroids are much smaller and are harder to detect due to their smaller size. Currently, scientists believe that meteoroids come from the asteroid belt after collisions break them apart. Comets are the farthest reaching objects found in the Oort cloud, close to 50,000 AU from the sun, and they have highly elliptical orbits which account for their great revolutions around the Sun.