Asteroid definitions and example sentences on Wordnik

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Definitions (10)

noun Astronomy Any of numerous small celestial bodies that revolve around the sun, with orbits lying chiefly between Mars and Jupiter and characteristic diameters between a few and several hundred kilometers. Also called minor planet, planetoid.
noun Zoology See starfish.
adjective Star-shaped.

The earth was struck by an asteroid, a huge amount of debris was jettisoned into the atmosphere. — Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world
This asteroid was about 10 to 12 km in diameter, which is large, but less than 0.2\% the diameter of the Earth.
Waiting at the moon's L5 Lagrange point, the asteroid was a smooth blackish ball, heat-absorbing armor slathered deep over the surface of a fully infested cubic kilometer—a city where thousands of bodies squirmed about in freefall, thriving inside a maze of warm tunnels and airy rooms. — FSF,April2008
A single glance at the asteroid was all it took to know that B was still too blazingly hot to risk direct exposure to it. — Warhorse
Getting Alec off the asteroid was a solvable problem, immediate, without the ambiguity of the message the statues sent. — Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January 2002