The Asteroid Belt
(THIS ASSIGNMENT DOES NOT NEED TO BE A PAGE JUST LONG ENOUGH THAT ANSWERED THE QUESTIONS THOROUGHLY) Many planetary scientists consider that the material remaining in the asteroid belt is the remnants of a former planet. There are many theories as to why this planet is in pieces. Two of such ideas are 1) that another large celestial body collided with it and destroyed it, and 2) that the gravity from Jupiter was too strong to allow the planet to appropriately congeal (accrete) and so it remained in fragments. Of these two possibilities (lets limit it to only these two) which do you think is the most plausible and why? OR is there another explanation you have read about? Sources to use: https://nypost.com/2020/01/09/new-research-finds-jupiter-is-flinging-asteroids-at-earth/?utm_source Though not entirely perfect, there is somewhat of a pattern to the distances of the planets from the Sun. Venus is 1.8 times as far from the Sun as Mercury, and Earth is about 1.4 times as far from the sun as Venus. Mars is 1.5 times farther than Earth. This seems to be a pattern – each planet could be between 1.4 and 1.8 times farther from the sun than its “inside” neighbor. Then comes the problem – Jupiter is 3.4 times farther from the sun than Mars. This is where the pattern falls apart, although some say that the asteroid belt, which is in between Jupiter and Mars, could count as a substitute for a planet.* Then Saturn is 1.8 times farther than Jupiter, Uranus is 2 times farther than Saturn, and Neptune is 1.6 times farther from the Sun than Uranus. There’s no real theory that explains why the planets ended up at the distances they did, so it could also be a complete coincidence that they’re somewhat evenly spaced. However, a good number of meteorites are differentiation, meaning that they have evidence of a core, crust, and mantle type features, which is currently only understood to have happened if a planet formed for long enough for the materials to separate on the inside of the planet by density… which would imply that the gravity was weak enough for a planet to form! What a conundrum!!!!
