• Question: do you know how many particles are in an astroid

    Asked by smcgovern755 to Jimmy on 20 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: James Holloway

      James Holloway answered on 20 Mar 2013:

      Let’s see…

      Let’s take the biggest one we know about: Ceres (its in our solar system)

      It weighs 946,000,000,000 billion kilograms.

      Assuming its made mostly of iron, we can calculate how many ‘mols’ of iron there are in it:

      946,000,000,000 billion kilos = 17 thousand billion billion mols of iron.

      (a mol is a certain number of particles, to be specific one mol is an unimaginable 600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles!).

      Now we multiple the number of mols by the number of particles in a mol to get the total number of particles. which is:

      287 million billion billion billion billion particles in our biggest asteroid.

      To write it out long hand its 287,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 particles.

      Or you can write this as 2.87 x 10 ^ 44
      (the ’10^44′ bit means it has 44 numbers after the decimal place).

      But the average asteriod is probably has a thousand times less than this 🙂

Comments

  • Photo: Jimmy

    Jimmy commented on :

    Oh, this is how many atoms are in the asteroid, but remember atoms are made of smaller particles. If you want to know how many elementary particles there are then multiple the answer I gave by 200.