Kirkwood Gap Facts for Kids
Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago
kids.kiddle.coResearchstory
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The HN community shares and discusses a website about Kirkwood gaps for kids, with some users appreciating the resource and others sharing related projects.
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- 01Story posted
Sep 21, 2025 at 12:03 AM EDT
3 months ago
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Sep 24, 2025 at 11:13 PM EDT
4d after posting
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2 comments in 84-96h
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Sep 25, 2025 at 11:49 AM EDT
3 months ago
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
https://dahlend.github.io/the_belt.html
This includes about 1.3 million known asteroids (most of the known ones), so the page is like 45mb. Consider yourself warned.
This is a plot of semi major axis, orbital eccentricity, and inclination of the orbit. The blobs are collisional groups, where a bigger rock(s) got smashed into 'families' of asteroids. Color is by the absolute magnitude H, which is a normalized, log scaled, brightness measurement. Typically smaller H means larger object.
You can see the Kirkwood gaps clearly along one axis, but as you move around you can see more complex orbital resonances. These resonances pump energy into or out of the orbit of the asteroid, causing them to leave the resonance after some time, depleting the region of phase space.
Source: I do solar system simulations for my PhD work.