Formation

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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, while occasionally colliding.[26] In regions where the average velocity of the collisions was too high, the shattering of planetesimals tended to dominate over accretion,[27] 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.[28]

During the early history of the Solar System, the asteroids melted to some degree, allowing elements within them to be partially or completely differentiated by mass. Some of the progenitor bodies may even have undergone periods of explosive volcanism and formed magma oceans. However, because of the relatively small size of the bodies, the period of melting was necessarily brief (compared to the much larger planets), and had generally ended about 4.5 billion years ago, in the first tens of millions of years of formation.[29] In August 2007, a study of zircon crystals in an Antarctic meteorite believed to have originated from 4 Vesta suggested that it, and by extension the rest of the asteroid belt, had formed rather quickly, within ten million years of the Solar System's origin.[30]

Evolution

The asteroids are not samples of the primordial Solar System. They have undergone considerable evolution since their formation, including internal heating (in the first few tens of millions of years), surface melting from impacts, space weathering from radiation, and bombardment by micrometeorites.[31] While some scientists refer to the asteroids as residual planetesimals,[32] other scientists consider them distinct.[33]

The current asteroid belt is believed to contain only a small fraction of the mass of the primordial belt. Computer simulations suggest that the original asteroid belt may have contained mass equivalent to the Earth. Primarily because of gravitational perturbations, most of the material was ejected from the belt within about a million years of formation, leaving behind less than 0.1% of the original mass.[26] Since their formation, the size distribution of the asteroid belt has remained relatively stable: there has been no significant increase or decrease in the typical dimensions of the main-belt asteroids.[34]

The 4:1 orbital resonance with Jupiter, at a radius 2.06 AU, can be considered the inner boundary of the asteroid belt. Perturbations by Jupiter send bodies straying there into unstable orbits. Most bodies formed inside the radius of this gap were swept up by Mars (which has an aphelion at 1.67 AU) or ejected by its gravitational perturbations in the early history of the Solar System.[35] The Hungaria asteroids lie closer to the Sun than the 4:1 resonance, but are protected from disruption by their high inclination.[36]

When the asteroid belt was first formed, the temperatures at a distance of 2.7 AU from the Sun formed a "snow line" below the freezing point of water. Planetesimals formed beyond this radius were able to accumulate ice.[37][38] In 2006 it was announced that a population of comets had been discovered within the asteroid belt beyond the snow line, which may have provided a source of water for Earth's oceans. According to some models, there was insufficient outgassing of water during the Earth's formative period to form the oceans, requiring an external source such as a cometary bombardment.[39]