How big are Honorverse Asteroid Belts?

Better to ask if all systems have asteroid belts. And why would they just because ours does?

Lord Skimper wrote:Supposedly they are mined for most of the resources for ship building tech space stations missiles etc....

The Sol Asteroid belt sounds impressive but is very small if all gathered together. 0.1% of the mass of the Earth. Mostly just dust with a few big chunks of rock and a little metal. Doubtful one could create 100 km space stations out of them plus 1000's of ships. Millions of missiles etc....

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge13 ... eroids.pdf

rdt wrote:Better to ask if all systems have asteroid belts. And why would they just because ours does?

Lord Skimper wrote:Supposedly they are mined for most of the resources for ship building tech space stations missiles etc....

The Sol Asteroid belt sounds impressive but is very small if all gathered together. 0.1% of the mass of the Earth. Mostly just dust with a few big chunks of rock and a little metal. Doubtful one could create 100 km space stations out of them plus 1000's of ships. Millions of missiles etc....

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge13 ... eroids.pdf

Correct me if I'm wrong, but our system's asteroid belt is the remnant of a planet that broke up sometime in the past, right? In that case, no, not all star systems would have asteroid belts of their own.

However, all systems will have vast quantities of asteroids distributed throughout the system, as ours does. That'd be because most 'free' asteroids (not part of the belt) are the remains of the primordial dust cloud from which the sun and the planets have formed, if I'm not mistaken. I might be, so don't take my word for it.

hanuman wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong, but our system's asteroid belt is the remnant of a planet that broke up sometime in the past, right? In that case, no, not all star systems would have asteroid belts of their own.

However, all systems will have vast quantities of asteroids distributed throughout the system, as ours does. That'd be because most 'free' asteroids (not part of the belt) are the remains of the primordial dust cloud from which the sun and the planets have formed, if I'm not mistaken. I might be, so don't take my word for it.

Everything in the solar system is a product of the primordial dust cloud. We believe the cloud contracted until it's gravity was intense enough to pull most of the rest of the cloud in, then exploded to become the sun. We then believe the sun then threw out many of the heavier elements formed during it's creation, forming the Acretion disk. The Acretion disk started to clump together under the constitutant parts' gravity, causing the planets to form.

The planets then fought for stability, gobbling up each other, disturbing each other's orbits and colliding with each other. (The current mainstream belief is Jupiter's gravity destabilized and then threw a mars-sized proto planet inward which collided with the proto Earth, creating the Earth and Moon as we know them today.)

Most of the inner solar system detrius is believed to be created at this point - not from the primordial cloud or the Acretion disk itself, but from the collisions after and during the planetary formation.

The Oort Cloud and Kuiper belts are a completely different beast - these are the OLD items thrown so far out that even when they clumped, they were too far apart to interact "much" with each other, let alone the major planets. These are believed to be from at least the Acretion disk.

Theemile wrote:Everything in the solar system is a product of the primordial dust cloud. We believe the cloud contracted until it's gravity was intense enough to pull most of the rest of the cloud in, then exploded to become the sun. We then believe the sun then threw out many of the heavier elements formed during it's creation, forming the Acretion disk. The Acretion disk started to clump together under the constitutant parts' gravity, causing the planets to form.

The planets then fought for stability, gobbling up each other, disturbing each other's orbits and colliding with each other. (The current mainstream belief is Jupiter's gravity destabilized and then threw a mars-sized proto planet inward which collided with the proto Earth, creating the Earth and Moon as we know them today.)

Most of the inner solar system detrius is believed to be created at this point - not from the primordial cloud or the Acretion disk itself, but from the collisions after and during the planetary formation.

The Oort Cloud and Kuiper belts are a completely different beast - these are the OLD items thrown so far out that even when they clumped, they were too far apart to interact "much" with each other, let alone the major planets. These are believed to be from at least the Acretion disk.

Okay. Thank you for clarifying that for me, Emile. That is very informative information.

Lord Skimper wrote:Supposedly they are mined for most of the resources for ship building tech space stations missiles etc....

The Sol Asteroid belt sounds impressive but is very small if all gathered together. 0.1% of the mass of the Earth. Mostly just dust with a few big chunks of rock and a little metal. Doubtful one could create 100 km space stations out of them plus 1000's of ships. Millions of missiles etc....

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge13 ... eroids.pdf

rdt wrote:Better to ask if all systems have asteroid belts. And why would they just because ours does?

hanuman wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong, but our system's asteroid belt is the remnant of a planet that broke up sometime in the past, right? In that case, no, not all star systems would have asteroid belts of their own.

Um, no.

According to current theories (the Nice model and the Grand Tour model) the asteroid belt never consolidated planetesimals into a planet. See the article at the Fount of All Knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid , also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_family .

hanuman wrote:However, all systems will have vast quantities of asteroids distributed throughout the system, as ours does. That'd be because most 'free' asteroids (not part of the belt) are the remains of the primordial dust cloud from which the sun and the planets have formed, if I'm not mistaken. I might be, so don't take my word for it.

As of now, we simply don't have the observational capability to detect systems that are similar to ours. While the Nice and Grand Tour models are pretty good at explaining our system in quite a bit of detail, my impression is that they can't tell us what proportion of other systems are going to have similar dynamics. Unfortunately.