Have you ever wondered what 100,000 asteroids look like? Not only has that question been answered, but a stunning new animation using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has visualized the orbits of 100,000 small bodies in our solar system.The seeds of this project were sown in 2008 by a group of astronomers led by Alex Parker. The team did a study of the size distribution of asteroid families using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. But they didn’t just plot their orbits, they looked at the distinct optical colors of each asteroid family, a tool that helped them separate groups.Asteroid families are simply clusters of objects orbiting in space. And there are a lot of families. A 2008 paper on which Parker was the lead author defined, from a sample of 80,000 asteroids, 37 statistically robust asteroid families having at least 100 members and 12 asteroid families with more than 1,000 members. Of these groups, four families were identifiable and isolated by optical colour alone.Parker’s team has managed to refine the method of separating asteroid family members by color. Last week, they pulled all this information together and created a stunning visualization.This animation shows the orbital movements of more than 100,000 asteroids, colored according to their compositional diversity and relative sizes of the asteroids. It shows highly precise orbits of main-belt and Trojan asteroids (asteroids that share an orbit with a planet) with a timestep of 3 days. As a reference, the average orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter are represented with rings.