Asteroid, Meteor, Meteorite, and Comet: What's the Difference?

 

Adding up all of the mass in every asteroid in our entire solar system totals only less than the mass of our Moon. Despite their small physical size, however, these space rocks offer important clues as to how our solar system formed. The terms asteroid, meteor, meteorite, and even comet are often used interchangeably...but what is the difference?

What is an asteroid?

Asteroids are rocky objects smaller than planets that are left over from the formation of our solar system. When the cloud of gas and dust collapsed to form our Sun, much of the remaining material went into forming the rocky terrestrial and gas giant planets orbiting our star. Smaller dust fragments that never made their way into planets are left behind as asteroids.

Of the millions of known asteroids, the largest is Ceres, 584 miles (940 kilometers) wide, although Ceres has been recently reclassified as a dwarf planet. Luckily we do not expect to cross paths with this Texas-sized solar system body any time soon. NASA tracks a subset of asteroids, called "near Earth objects" or NEOs, whose trajectories have been nudged by the gravitational push and pull of nearby planets enough so that they may pass close to Earth.

Asteroids are rocky objects smaller than planets that are left over from the formation of our solar system.

Thanks to infrared surveys of the sky like NASA’s WISE and NEOWISE missions, we know of roughly 1,000 near Earth asteroids that are larger than 0.6 miles across (or 1,000 meters) and 1,500 more that are between a third of a mile and 0.6 miles across (from 500 to 1,000 meters). Smaller near Earth asteroids, both known to exist and predicted based on statistical analysis, number in the 18,000s.

Most are not round like planets but rather irregular in shape sometimes due to repeated impacts over time. They are also known to orbit each other, making their way around the Sun in pairs or small groups. They are not large enough to hold onto their own atmospheres and their compositions vary mostly due to the location where they were formed, in particular how far away they were from the Sun when they originated.

Most asteroids reside in the asteroid belt, the space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, most likely because the gravitational pull of Jupiter prevented them from accumulating into a larger planetary system. Some asteroids are also found in the orbital paths of planets like Earth. Until...

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