where did the asteroid belt come from?

Question

one theory is that it use to be a planet.if so why was it destroyed

Answer 1

coventional woudl say never formed but thats crap like usually

here is what hapend in great detail

http://www.enterprisemission.com/tides.htm



these guys

had a fight they bluew it up:)

Answer 2

All the planets in the solar system are made because of the sun. This includes the astroid belt.

Let's start at the beginning. Our sun was not always yellow or of this size and heat. Suns start out being very hot. Blue in fact is the hottest and smallest. That is, blue stars are hot hot hot hot burning suns that are very small and new. Gradually, the suns becomes cooler as they start dispensing energy and their masses decrease while their size increases. As their energy gets reduced and their masses increase they start having more gravetational power which draws debris towards them. Simple Newton's laws stuff. Eventually the Sun changes color reflecting the level of heat and the age of the sun or the star. The red suns are the coolest suns (I don't mean that they are cold but they are not as hot as the blue or yellow suns) and the red suns are the largest ones (that's why we see them mostly in the sky as red stars). Now these red suns eventually burn no more and turn into this huge star that is no longer dispensing energy but that mass can be so large and massive that it sucks everything into it which is known as the black hole, a concept still too hard for me to visualize honestly because it is just .. well .. to me unimaginable. Not all stars become black holes.

So, when the SUN was still young (new and blue and what not), and this is the case with all stars, it grabbed universal debris (solar debris) and overtime that turned into planets. This is how any solar system is built. You would think think that the Hubble's asteroid comes around and goes around as it pleases? No. It is all part of a system that got frozen in time at some point. Hubble's asteroid like anyhting else is moved by the gravity forced on it by every element in the solar system.

Due to gravity (forces of attraction between objects of a large mass), these planets started accumulating debris until they became planets. Some debris was collected well some was not. The asteroid belt is just a bunch of scattered debris that at a point in time froze into a solar position and kept circuling around the Sun in that orbit keeping a well-calculated distance from the sun and the planets. Nothing circulates in the universe arbitrarily. Every object in the universe is at a certain position because of some gravetational forces that placed in that position, and I am not talking about one or two forces but millions of forces. That is, the sun is where it is, the whole solar system is where it is because of how the forces between this solar system and other solar systems interacted to place us where we are.

You can think of all the planets as collated solar debris that just froze at one point in time due to distance and mass at a specific position and started circulating around the sun. Think of it this way, the satellites surrounding the earth act like the asteroid belt. They are scattered, but they were frozen at that point such that they can circulate around the earth. They are not moved by power or nothing, they just take an orbit and stick to it.

Answer 3

It didn't used to be a planet. Here's the real theory:

Scientists say that the formation of the asteroid belt is due to the incomplete formation of a 5th rocky planet. Jupiter's amazing large mass acts like a minature sun, pulling the particles that would be a planet apart from one another as the sun wishes to pull them toward one another. Their gravitational pulls kind of cancel and the bits just remain as bits.

Eliminate Jupiter and you've eliminated the asteroid belt...eventually.

Answer 4

If you take all the material in the asteroid belt, you wouldn't get enough to make even a tiny planet - no planet ever existed there. As a previous poster mentioned, the gravitational pull of Jupiter prevented any planet from forming there in the first place.

Planets form by accretion - bits of dust stick together forming pebbles, pebbles stick together forming rocks, rocks stick together forming bigger rocks, and so on until you get a planet. Asteroids crashing into planets is just the final stage of accretion.

Answer 5

It's thought that there was another rocky planet in formation, similar to Mars, where the asteroid belt is. The theory is that the gravitational pull of Jupiter tore it apart. At the time, Jupiter was the main gravitational body in the solar system and, due to it's pull, caused the nearby smaller bodies to speed up and collide with one another, further breaking them up so that a planet was unable to coalesce.

Answer 6

the asteroids came from the rock belt between the two planets of jupiter and saturn

Answer 7

The theory is that it was a planet that never made it; Jupiter's gravity was so enormous it kept the planet from coming together and still is.

Answer 8

Yes

Answer 9

One theory is that it is a failed planet beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Another is that it is debris left over from accretion period.

Answer 10

SOMETHING HIT IT!!!!!