Most asteroids are just pieces of dead planets

It is tempting to imagine that the asteroids that litter our solar system have been there from the beginning, surrounding the sun for centuries as planets have formed, but new research suggests that things are not happening. are not unrolled like that. They were not just transient collections of dust and debris that came to form larger rocks. No, the asteroids we see today have much more complicated origins.

According to a new article published in Nature Astronomy, many pieces of rock within our small planetary neighborhood are actually pieces of dead planets for a long time.

Astronomers classify asteroids according to their origin, whether it is a planet still present as Mars, an unknown body that no longer exists, or even a different system – but the number of sources that have contributed to the collection of asteroids around us is still being determined. This new research cycle looked closely at the composition of individual asteroids in the inner solar system, as well as their current orbital trajectories, and then found the time to determine where each was born.

The article reveals that a huge majority – about 85 percent of the rocks inside our system probably come from a handful of ancient planets. These larger bodies routinely interfered with each other, leading to collisions or, in some cases, reciprocal gravitational tears. The result was many pieces of lost rock that had no house, but remained in orbits that mimicked those of their mother planet.

Each asteroid that traces its birth to the same body helps to form a larger "family" of asteroids, and scientists are now using this information as a foundation for explaining what are the long-lost planets, including their composition while trying to determine why some asteroids within a family may differ significantly.