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After some minor fixes I made to the visualization of 1,509,413 asteroids, and their position in space as of last week, it's good to go for Wikipedia! commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:As...

There are more ways to visualize asteroids, such as their location in space today. Here are 1,509,413 of them, plotted to scale with each other (but not to the planets or their orbits). We can clearly see the main belt in white and Trojan asteroids in pink.

Positions, sizes, and magnitudes of asteroids are derived from the JPL Small Bodies Database, with orbital elements integrated from the provided epoch (mostly November 2025). Planet positions are from DE440; coordinates are in the J2000 ecliptic, with the +x axis pointing to the vernal equinox.

There are more ways to visualize asteroids, such as their location in space today. Here are 1,509,413 of them, plotted to scale with each other (but not to the planets or their orbits). We can clearly see the main belt in white and Trojan asteroids in pink.

The side view of the asteroid belt (bottom) shows that it's more of a donut, though it is far emptier--space is big, and most asteroids are found several million km from each other. The pink Trojans can have high-inclination orbits, due to the stability of Jupiter's L4 and L5 Lagrange points.

There are more ways to visualize asteroids, such as their location in space today. Here are 1,509,413 of them, plotted to scale with each other (but not to the planets or their orbits). We can clearly see the main belt in white and Trojan asteroids in pink.

This is a graph of the inclination vs semi-major axis (distance from the sun) of 1,249,051 asteroids in the asteroid belt. Using proper elements allows us to see the belt's fine structure, including asteroid families that are fragments of past collisions. Each asteroid is (roughly) to scale.

Asteroid proper elements are from Nesvorný et al. 2025, www2.boulder.swri.edu/~davidn/Prop.... Diameters are derived from the JPL Small Bodies Database (SBDB) where available, or otherwise guessed from the absolute magnitude and mean albedo of each sub-belt.

This is a graph of the inclination vs semi-major axis (distance from the sun) of 1,249,051 asteroids in the asteroid belt. Using proper elements allows us to see the belt's fine structure, including asteroid families that are fragments of past collisions. Each asteroid is (roughly) to scale.

Here's another graph, showing the eccentricity vs the semi-major axis. While most asteroids are ejected from the major resonances with Jupiter, forming the Kirkwood gaps, some are trapped there and gradually excited onto planet-crossing orbits.