Here’s a fascinating video animating our discovery of asteroids in the aptly named ‘belt‘ between 1980 and 2010.

You’ll notice detection generally occurs in relation to the third blue dot sweeping around the sun. That’s us, silly goose! The discovery rate increased in the 90’s as the process became more automated. Then in very recent times you can see we’ve gone triple barrel on that ass.

Notice Jupiter outside the belt – the other planets aren’t even shown. They be far out, yo!