BBC Sky at Night Magazine

In reality, dodging destructio­n is easy

The Empire Strikes Back,

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To evade being shot down by Tie Fighters in the Millennium Falcon hides out in an asteroid field. The asteroid field of the film is a densely packed place, filled with rocks that are constantly colliding and hitting the ship. But in reality, you’d have to be trying quite hard to even find an asteroid, let alone be struck by one.

If you landed the Millennium Falcon on a body in our Asteroid Belt the nearest one would be nearly 1 million km away: you’d need binoculars to see any evidence of it. The region hasn’t always been this sparse though. It’s estimated that the Asteroid Belt contained as much as 1,000 times more mass than it does now, but shortly after its formation collisions and gravitatio­nal disturbanc­es would have thrown out most of the debris. Even if the belt still had its initial mass, it would be hundreds of thousands of kilometres between asteroids.

In other planetary systems more compact asteroid belts have been found, most within the snow line, the radius at which ice forms in a planetary disc. Beyond this giant planets tend to disperse the asteroids. Some asteroid belts have been found with as much as 25 times more mass than the one between Mars and Jupiter. This would still leave huge gaps between the space rocks, not the densely packed field depicted in the film. If a belt were that dense, the constant collisions between the rocks would soon grind them down into little more than dust.

 ??  ?? Some asteroids even have moons, as is the
case with 243 Ida
Some asteroids even have moons, as is the case with 243 Ida

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