The asteroid belt is found orbiting between Mars and Jupiter and is a vast collection of rocks that is thought to be a planet that never formed. When our Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago, the material in this region should have coalesced into a planet, however, Jupiter’s gravitational influence prevented this from happening, stirring up the region so that collisions became destructive rather than constructive. What remains today contains only about 3% of the Moon’s mass scattered across millions of kilometres.
Jupiter’s influence didn’t stop there. Gravitational resonances, areas in space where the orbital periods of asteroids create regular interactions with Jupiter, Saturn, and even Mars, destabilise asteroid orbits, flinging fragments either toward the inner Solar System, where Earth resides, or outward toward Jupiter’s orbit. Asteroid fragments that don’t escape are ground down by mutual collisions into meteoritic dust.
A team of astronomers led by Julio Fernández from the Universidad de la República in Uruguay has calculated precisely how fast this depletion of asteroid belt material is progressing. They found that the asteroid belt is currently losing approximately 0.0088% of the portion of the asteroid belt that’s still participating in the ongoing collisions. That might sound like a small number but it represents a significant flow of material when considered over the immense timescales of Solar System evolution.
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