What region is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter?

What region is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter?

• A. Kuiper belt
• B. Asteroid belt
• C. Oort cloud
• D. Asteroid family

Answer: (B)

Belts of small bodies form where gravity shapes debris into a ring around the Sun. Between Mars and Jupiter, rocky material didn’t combine into a planet because Jupiter’s strong gravity stirred things up, leaving many individual rocky objects in orbit instead. That ring of rocky bodies is the asteroid belt. It’s made of leftovers from the early solar system, not a single planet. Beyond Neptune lies the Kuiper belt, which contains icy objects far from the Sun. The Oort cloud is a distant, roughly spherical shell far beyond the planets and is the source of many comets. An asteroid family isn’t a region itself; it’s a group of asteroids that share similar orbits because they came from the same original body after a collision.

Belts of small bodies form where gravity shapes debris into a ring around the Sun. Between Mars and Jupiter, rocky material didn’t combine into a planet because Jupiter’s strong gravity stirred things up, leaving many individual rocky objects in orbit instead. That ring of rocky bodies is the asteroid belt. It’s made of leftovers from the early solar system, not a single planet.

Beyond Neptune lies the Kuiper belt, which contains icy objects far from the Sun. The Oort cloud is a distant, roughly spherical shell far beyond the planets and is the source of many comets. An asteroid family isn’t a region itself; it’s a group of asteroids that share similar orbits because they came from the same original body after a collision.