Professor Lewis Dartnell for BBC Sky at Night Magazine about the origins of the asteroid belt

In the article, Professor Dartnell wrote about the asteroid belt, which sits between Mercury and Neptune and is the widest region of the Solar System that does not contain a major planet.

Discussing the asteroid belt, he wrote: “The total mass of this sparse region of rocky rubble is a mere one-thousandth that of Earth’s, and a single asteroid, Ceres, comprises almost a third of this total mass.”

He said that despite how well we can characterise the asteroid belt today, we do not know for certain how it came about in the first place. Talking about new research in this area, he added: “As Raymond and Nesvorny discuss, the classical view is that the asteroid belt formed within the gassy, dusty disc swirling around the primordial Sun, as a swarm of leftover planetesimals, with an initial mass of perhaps several Earth masses in total. 

“Over time, so this hypothesis goes, 99.9% of this material was ejected out of this orbital region by gravitational interactions from the planets (including the possible early migration of Jupiter and Saturn) - and so the asteroid belt we observe today represents the remnants of a heavily depleted reservoir of planetesimals.”

Read the full article on the BBC Sky at Night Magazine website.