<P> By 1807, further investigation revealed two new objects in the region: Juno and Vesta . The burning of Lilienthal in the Napoleonic wars, where the main body of work had been done, brought this first period of discovery to a close . </P> <P> Despite Herschel's coinage, for several decades it remained common practice to refer to these objects as planets and to prefix their names with numbers representing their date of discovery: 1 Ceres, 2 Pallas, 3 Juno, 4 Vesta . However, in 1845 astronomers detected a fifth object (5 Astraea) and, shortly thereafter, new objects were found at an accelerating rate . Counting them among the planets became increasingly cumbersome . Eventually, they were dropped from the planet list (as first suggested by Alexander von Humboldt in the early 1850s) and Herschel's choice of nomenclature, "asteroids", gradually came into common use . </P> <P> The discovery of Neptune in 1846 led to the discrediting of the Titius--Bode law in the eyes of scientists because its orbit was nowhere near the predicted position . To date, there is no scientific explanation for the law, and astronomers' consensus regards it as a coincidence . </P> <P> The expression "asteroid belt" came into use in the very early 1850s, although it is hard to pinpoint who coined the term . The first English use seems to be in the 1850 translation (by E.C. Otté) of Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos: "(...) and the regular appearance, about the 13th of November and the 11th of August, of shooting stars, which probably form part of a belt of asteroids intersecting the Earth's orbit and moving with planetary velocity". Another early appearance occurred in Robert James Mann's A Guide to the Knowledge of the Heavens: "The orbits of the asteroids are placed in a wide belt of space, extending between the extremes of (...)". The American astronomer Benjamin Peirce seems to have adopted that terminology and to have been one of its promoters . </P>

Comets are made of mostly rocky material from the asteroid belt