As Byeol-maru drew closer to the asteroid belt, the number of rocks visible through the window kept increasing. Hyeongseop leaned forward, eyes wide.
“Byeoli, we need to be careful! Aren’t we going to crash into one of these rocks?”
Byeoli answered, sounding perfectly calm.
“This is actually something people often get wrong. In movies, flying through an asteroid belt always looks like dodging rocks left and right, but that’s really not how it works.”
“Huh? So it’s not dangerous?”
“The asteroid belt is an incredibly vast space. There are millions of rocks floating around inside it, but the distance between them is so enormous that it’s actually almost completely empty. A spacecraft could fly straight through the asteroid belt with no steering at all, and the odds of hitting anything would be extremely low.”
Hyeongseop looked a little deflated.
“Aw, so it’s not dangerous at all?”
“Well, it’s not zero. It’s just not the densely packed field of rocks people imagine.”
Byeol-maru drew close to one particularly large, round rock. Unlike the others, it was nearly a perfect sphere.
“Hey, why is that one so round? All the others are so lumpy.”
“That’s Ceres. It’s the largest object in the asteroid belt, big enough that its own weight pulled it into a round shape. Because of that, Ceres isn’t classified as an asteroid, it’s classified as a dwarf planet.”
“A dwarf planet? I think I’ve heard that before.”
“That’s right, same category as Pluto. Objects too small to really count as planets, but big enough to pull themselves into a round shape, get that label.”
Hyeongseop studied Ceres’s surface closely. Among the big and small craters, a few unusually bright white spots caught his eye.
“What are those white spots? They look like patches of snow.”
“That’s exposed salt. Ceres has ice mixed into its ground, and scientists think there may have once been a salty underground ocean beneath its surface.”
“Whoa, so there might have been water here too?”
“That’s the possibility, yes. Isn’t it amazing how traces of water keep turning up all over the solar system?”
Byeol-maru passed Ceres and picked up speed again. A new question crossed Hyeongseop’s mind.
“So Byeoli, why didn’t all these rocks ever clump together into one big planet?”
“Because of Jupiter, right next door. Jupiter’s gravity is so strong that every time material here tried to clump together, Jupiter kept pulling and shaking it apart before it could form into one whole planet. So the leftover material that never quite became a planet is still scattered here today.”
“So Jupiter is the reason a planet never formed here.”
“You could look at it that way. And speaking of which, we’re about to go meet Jupiter in person.”
As Byeol-maru cleared the asteroid belt completely, a massive, banded planet began to slowly reveal itself in the distance. Hyeongseop couldn’t tear his eyes from the window, overwhelmed by its sheer size.
(To be continued — Episode 4: Jupiter, the Planet of Giant Storms)
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