Every Hidden Danger In Our Solar System Explained In 16 Minutes

Asteroids Everyone already fears these rocky leftovers from the birth of the planets, and for once the fossil record proves the fear correct. Most of them sit quietly in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. The danger is the ones that do not stay there. Gravitational nudges from Jupiter and the occasional collision constantly knock objects out of the belt and onto paths that cross our own orbit. Sixty-six million years ago, one of them, roughly six miles across, struck what is now the Yucatán Peninsula.