Scattered between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter lies the main asteroid belt — a vast region filled with rocky remnants left over from the birth of the solar system. These objects, known as asteroids or planetoids (from the Greek for "star-like"), are time capsules from an era before planets fully formed.
The asteroid belt sits more than two and a half times farther from the sun than Earth and contains millions of objects ranging from pebble-sized fragments to bodies hundreds of miles wide. While most are irregular chunks of rock, the belt also hosts its largest resident, the dwarf planet Ceres — a world rich in ice and intriguing chemistry.
