The Asteroid Belt

The Asteroid Belt

The Asteroid Belt
Reading Level

	edHelper's suggested reading level:	grades 3 to 5
	Flesch-Kincaid grade level:	6.45

Vocabulary

challenging words:

material, orbit, past, rocks, giant, surface, outer, just, belt, form, balls, between, large, system, also, group

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The Asteroid Belt
By Cindy Grigg

¹ Just past Mars there are millions of chunks of rocks orbiting the sun. They are not really rocks but are called asteroids. Asteroids are made of rocky material with some metals in it. This large group of asteroids orbiting the sun is called the asteroid belt. The asteroid belt is an area between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Most of the asteroids in our solar system are found there. They orbit the sun just as the planets do, but asteroids are too small to be planets. Astronomers think that the asteroid belt is made up of material that was never able to form into a planet. Some think that it's the remains of a planet which broke apart a very long time ago. The asteroid belt contains millions of asteroids. The largest asteroid is about one-fourth the size of our moon.

² The planets inside the asteroid belt (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) are called the rocky planets. Each of them has a rocky, hard surface. These planets are also smaller than the outer planets. The other four planets beyond the asteroid belt (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) are called gas giants. They are all very large planets and are giant balls of gas with small rocky centers.

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