Amazing asteroid video reveals the colourful work of art painted across the inner solar system

This video, created by Alex Parker, an astronomer and planetary scientist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, reveals the mesmerizing collection of over 100,000 asteroids orbiting around our sun, as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The orbits of all the known asteroids catalogued by the survey are shown, as well as the orbital paths of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Jupiter. The main 'doughnut' of colour between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter represent the objects in the solar system's main asteroid belt. Look closely inside the doughnut-hole and you can see the various Aten, Apollo, Amor and IEO asteroids as they zip around closer to the sun, and sometimes cross Earth's orbital path! Also shown are the two 'Trojan' asteroid clusters — one that precedes Jupiter in its orbit, and the other that follows along behind it.

The relative sizes and even the colours of the asteroids are shown true in the video. If we were to fly out there in a spaceship and look at them, most of these asteroid would simply appear grey to us. However, the survey's five-colour camera is able to pick out the subtle colour variations that would be missed by our eyes. Studies of these variations have shown that the asteroid belt isn't just a disorganized jumble of rocks. Instead, the compositions of the asteroids change between the inner edge and the outer edge, and the Trojan asteroids are different as well.

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Alex Parker has an incredible gift for turning science into art, and this is just his latest video. A personal favourite from his previous works is how he took every planetary candidate picked out of the data from the Kepler Space Telescope as of March 2012 and put them orbiting the same sun-like star. The dizzying three-minute video is an incredible glimpse into the variety of planets that likely populate only a small portion of our galaxy, especially when one realizes that the vast majority of the planets in the video circle the star well within the orbit of Mercury.

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