about the possible creation of a new planet....?

Question

the astroid belt between jupiter and mars, there is enough rocks there to create a planet possibly the size of earth. why didnt it ever become a planet? can we some how turn it into one? what could be the bad side of doing that?

what if we were to add that mass to Mars, once again i am not saying right now, obviosly not, but some times in the future, we could gather these rocks using probes not shuttles, they only require a little push from one direction to get them out of thier orbit and direct them to collide with Mars. the reason i dont think we should leave them as they are is because they are in danger of colliding with earth.

ps, you dont need to gather each and every single one of the asteroids, you just need a ball big enough to pull the rest of them into it. when it gets big enough it will automatically generate its own gravity by orbiting it self, if its large enough that is.

Answer 1

The main asteroid belt was formed because Jupiter's gravitational influence and its orbital resonance with the sun prevented the planetesimals there from coalescing into a planet.

The question is, why would we want to "create" a new planet? It would be outside the habitable zone of our solar system, so humans would be unable to survive there without life support systems.

Answer 2

>there is enough rocks there to create a planet possibly the size of earth.

Actually, there isn't. The amount of mass in the Asteroid Belt is only enough to make a very small dwarf planet. Ceres itself (the largest asteroid) contains almost a third of the Asteroid Belt's mass itself, and is STILL only about 10% the mass of Pluto, which itself is only 0.2% the mass of Earth.

>why didnt it ever become a planet?

There is a good chance that a small planet or dwarf planet once existed there, but was destroyed in a collision with another object, leaving a collection of asteroids some of which became the modern asteroids (the others were swept up by the Solar System's other planets and we can't see them anymore).

>can we some how turn it into one?

We might be able to crash the asteroids together into a single body at some point in the future, yes. However it is a very long-term goal as it would require enormous amounts of equipment and fuel. It would also have to be done very carefully to avoid blasting more mass OFF Ceres than you're putting on.

>what could be the bad side of doing that?

Well, for one thing all the useful minerals would all then have a larger gravity well for ships to climb out of. It might be better to mine the useful minerals out of the asteroids and THEN crash them together, so that the resulting planet is smaller and contains less useful minerals.

Answer 3

This would be planet could not exist due to the gravitational influence of Jupiter and the inner planets, tugging at the asteroids. Their forces kept the material in the form of ring orbiting the Sun.

Practically speaking, gathering up the hundreds of thousands of asteroids in itself would be impossible. Assuming we could
accomplish this, the position of this planet, at about 3 AU, would lie three times the distance of the Earth from the Sun.

At this distance, the planet would receive 1/9 of the energy received by the Earth. Water would freeze. And unless we could generate an artificial magnetic field around the planet, it would be contaminated by solar and cosmic radiation. The planet would be unsuitable for vegetation, let alone human life.

Furthermore, the presence of a planet between Mars and Jupiter may alter the orbits of the inner planets, drastically effecting life on Earth.

Answer 4

The accretion theory states that our solar system formed as a dense cloud of gas surrounding the newly formed sun.

The idea is that many planets formed during this period in time and many were involved in collisions which vastly reduced the numbers of planets orbiting the sun - the guess is from around as many as 1000 + to the nine or ten which are argued about today.

Much of the debris left over from this period of planet forming and collisions became the asteroid belt - some of which are continent sized, others merely small rocks.

We don't have the technology to form a planet from the asteroid belt. It would be simpler to make another planet suitable for human habitation, like Mars for instance, but that is firmly in the realms of science fiction at the moment.

Answer 5

Ah, good old Sumerians! Do you know why the circle is divided into 360 degrees? Yes, it is because the Sumerians believed the years was 360 days. Quite handy since the divided the unit into fractions of one sixtieth and 360 = 6 x 60. They defined the degree as the sun's right ascension (how much it moves in relation to the starry background in the course of one day). Hence, a year of 360 days, only wrong by 5.25 days! But if they had, really, bothered to count the days of the year, after a life time of observation, any Sumerian astronomer would realize that he had shifted the seasons by a few months! Hence they didn't even bother to count the days of the year. Perhaps only the moons and the astronimical events like, the solstices. And you believe they knew something we don't? I don't understand how.

Answer 6

While there are many asteroids in the belt, there is only approximately 3.0X10^21 kg of material. That is only about 4% of the mass of the moon.

Also, the amount of energy required to gather all of the asteroids together would be tremendous. The asteroid belt is mostly empty. The 11 largest asteroids make up about half of total mass in the belt.

Answer 7

Why the heck would we want to create a new planet? That would be a waste of extremely valuable resources that can be put towards something more useful. I think we should concentrate our efforts in outer space to understand better what is already there, and not try to introduce anything new. Plus, don't you think that's a little out of our means? I don't think it's possible to do such a thing...at least today.

Answer 8

There are enough rocks there to create a planet because it was , likely, a planet at one time. Now the rocks, or asteriods still orbit in the same spot as the planet they once made up. Currently, there is no science or mechanics capable of putting together a planet. In fact, we are not even able to go that far into space in a manned spacecraft. The logistics are impossible at this time. That isn't to say that, in time a means of creating a planet there might not be found.

Answer 9

I like the planet we have well enough, pity mankind doesn't seem to want to preserve it.

Course the good thing is you could go live on that newly created planet and leave those of use who appreciate Earth to live happily ever after.

The bad side is man will probably kill the creation.

Answer 10

There's not enough rock there to create even a body as small as our moon. Who told you otherwise? The total volume of the asteroids is less than 1% that of Earth.