Is the Asteroid Belt in a plane that intersects Earth and Jupiter?

Question

Is the Asteroid Belt in the same plane as Earth and Jupiter or they are in different planes?

Answer 1

This question is similar to: Do the planets, asteroid belt, kuiper belt, and scattered disk lie on the same plane?

Earth is on the ecliptic plane, Jupiter is 1.305° inclined relative to the ecliptic, so not quite coplanar but pretty close.

The asteroid belt, being made up of a diverse set of rocks, is all over the place (from here):

The description of that image:

The orbital inclination histogram [above], which is binned in intervals of 0.1°, shows that asteroids are another exception to this rule. The average orbital inclination is about 8.2°.

Between planets (especially Jupiter) perturbing orbits of asteroids and asteroids occasionally hitting each other and breaking apart the asteroid belt isn't stable enough to gather into a planet or even a single plane or type of orbit. To present the orbits differently, this image from Wikipedia shows the grouping of asteroids in similar orbits:

Where

• $i_p(^\circ)$ is inclination from the ecliptic in degrees

• $e_p$ is orbital eccentricity from 0=circular to 1=a maximally elongated ellipse

and the subscript $p$ stands for proper orbital elements (a kind of average over time) which are distinct from current or osculating orbital elements. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_family#Description