Thursday 31 December 2009

planetary formation - Why haven't asteroid belts turned into new large bodies?

From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#Formation



Planetesimals within the region which would become the asteroid belt were too strongly perturbed by Jupiter's gravity to form a planet. Instead they continued to orbit the Sun as before, and occasionally colliding.[27] In regions where the average velocity of the collisions was too high, the shattering of planetesimals tended to dominate over accretion,[28] preventing the formation of planet-sized bodies. Orbital resonances occurred where the orbital period of an object in the belt formed an integer fraction of the orbital period of Jupiter, perturbing the object into a different orbit; the region lying between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter contains many such orbital resonances. As Jupiter migrated inward following its formation, these resonances would have swept across the asteroid belt, dynamically exciting the region's population and increasing their velocities relative to each other.[29]

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