Don’t Be Fooled by These Images!
These two drawings and others like them commonly seen in textbooks and museums can fool you and lead to an important misconception. There are over 100,000 dots representing asteroids in these drawings, and just by looking at them you might think that asteroids in the Main Belt are so close together that you could almost jump from asteroid to asteroid:
But that is not correct! The dots in the drawings are huge compared to the actual size of the asteroids. The space represented in the drawings of the asteroid belt is hundreds of millions of kilometers across. A simple calculation shows that, on average, the distance between individual numbered asteroids is about a million miles. If you were standing on an asteroid in the middle of the main belt, you would not see lots of huge rocks hanging in space like the above illustration. Instead, you would be lucky to see even one other asteroid with your unaided eye — and even then it would be just a point of light lost among the stars.
