Much like the Oort cloud I think the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter are just leftovers from the formation of the solar system.

You never know maybe in another billion years some of the larger asteroids in the belt may mingle and create a minor planet

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

"never" is a very very long time. I see no compelling reason it would be impossible to travel between stars, if we set our collective minds to it.

But I would not feel too far out on a limb to say "not in my lifetime".

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Janice

I would presume that the asteroid belt was not the remains of a planet.
I like Michael was not there at the time,but I'm sure it must be the remains of at
least two planets.
This I would imagine was after the Earth collided with it's sister planet.( can't remember it's
name ,and if I try to look it up,I will have to write this again from the start).
The resulting explosion formed the earth we know today,and the moon, and therefore
had time to coalesce ( that can't be spelt right,but my spellchecker isn't kicking in).
Apparantly the earth and moon didn't take that long to form after the collision,
(in a geological timeframe),so I would presume the collision ( and the resulting
kerfufel ) could have been very recent in geological terms.
It could possibly be traced back in time to one of our past mass extinction
events ( I dunno ).
I am sure that in time ( not in my lifetime ) it will eventually form another small planet
if the gravity of the Earth/Mars/Jupiter etc don't eject larger asteroids from the belt,
before they can join with other ones.

Gravity ( wonderful isn't it)
oh and explosions, they are wonderful as well.

john3760

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Darth Vader and his Death Star was to blame for that mess. :D

Cheers.

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I noticed a new post and re-read the thread ( and unfortunately my post).

It seems to be google translated from gibberish to gobbledygook !!!

I knew what I meant when I was writing it,but my fingers and brain let me
down ( big style) .

What I was trying to say was the alleged ( by me ) collision of planets which
may have formed the asteroid belt must have occurred after the protoplanitary
impact which formed our earth and the moon.

I believe another two protoplanets ( orbiting between earth and mars)
may have collided recently ( in geological terms) to form the asteroid belt.
And possibly may have been a cause for one of earths early mass extinction
events. (as we would have been bombarded with meteorites),and a cause for
many of the craters on the moon.

I hope this makes more sense :)

john3760

p.s If this post makes too much sense combine it with my above post to the required
sense / nonsense taste !!!

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OK what if the earth moon collision were true. What if the collision occurred beyond mars and the collision pushed the earth moon inward in the solar system. Would a collision such as this be great enough for both objects to be move that far out of an orbit? Could this account for the delay in life being generated on Earth?
Am I grasping at straws? Did I eat to much candy?

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

The earth and the moon did not collide.
Two protoplanets collided,forming the earth and the moon.
The delay in life forming on earth,is the inhospitabilty for life to exist
in the earths early (first billion) years.
It was for a very long time,a seething mass of lava and volcanic activity,with an
extremely noctious atmosphere.
Anyway this thread is about the formation of the asteroid belt,which I believe
was caused by a collision between two planets,after the earth and moon had already formed.
This could have happened nearer the sun than the asteroid belt is located today,but
drifted to it's present location due to gravitational forces needing to be equalised
to form a steady orbit.

john3760

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Couple problems with the overall premise of this thread:

According to the Wiki article, the asteroid belt contains only enough mass to make a body 4% of the mass of the Moon. Hardly enough to account for two colliding planets. I suppose that some of it could have been lobbed out into the Oort cloud or gobbled up by Jupiter but it seems like a lot more of the mass from two colliding plants ought to have stayed in the belt region than less than 1% of their initial mass.

Second, Bodes Law isn't, AFAIK, based on any actual science. It is more like Moore's Law (the 'law' that computing power doubles ever 18 months). I.E. it is an interesting observation, a fun trick-with-numbers, but is not a universal requirement. It doesn't really fit very well with observations of our own Solar System and doesn't work at all with other observed solar systems.

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Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein

So what makes up the Asteroid belt?

Make it Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta.

Ceres is approximately 800 km across.

Vesta I know for certain I have seen with my own telescope (a good 2.4 inch Polarex Unitron refractor which unfortunately was thrown away a long time ago).

Not to forget Eros. It is some 22 km long and maybe 5-6 km in thickness.

Compare with Manhattan, New York, perhaps. But maybe a little thicker around - like a cigar.

Which reminds me about the classic movie Encyclopaedia Galactica.

Remember that we won the war aginst the Cylones, but taking a mother earth down while the big Cylone ships were destroyed. This meant we had to move on and find ourselves another world to live on instead.

I saw on one of the science shows about the solar system that the asteroids, as numerous as they are, do not come close to having enough mass to form even a small planet. Sort of like the fact that Jupiter, while large, does not even come close to having enough mass to form into a star.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Thank you KensieB.

I keep forgetting about wiki as I have probably only used it 2 or 3 times before.
I typed in asteroid belt in google,went to the wiki page,and in the first few paragraphs ,
it mentions protoplanets colliding to form the asteroid belt,and gives theories as to
where the lost mass disappeared to.
We have no idea how big these protoplanets were,as they were destroyed in collisions
or joined together to become the planets as we know them today.
What if they were both the size of mercury, or just a bit larger than Pluto ?
Then the mass contained within the asteroid belt , plus the guesstimated loss over 3 to 4
billion years, would be a rough equal to those protoplanets mass.
I was no way insinuating that the colliding protolanets were the size of the earth,the moon or anywhere near.
I have read and seen on various documentaries,that there may have been hundreds of
protoplanets in the formative years of our solar system,and when you think about it,it makes sense.
The dust and gas cloud which surrounded our early sun,gradually clumped together
under gravitational forces.These larger dust particles joined together and so on,until
you get to a size you can classify as a protoplanet.
These early protoplanets collide,either forming larger protoplanets ,or destroying each other
and forming clouds of rock and dust.This continues(and still continues to a lesser extent
in our solar system today), until we get the solar system we see today.
These protoplanets could of course have been large as well as small.The reason they are called protoplanets is because they don't exist today.The ones that survived the turbulent birth
of our solar system are called planets and moons( the ones we see today).

john3760

p.s If this post makes too much sense combine it with my first post to the required
sense / nonsense taste

p.p.s. Hello Bob !!

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Hello John!

I guess it all sort of depends on how we define the idea of leftovers from the start of the solar system. I agree that, in the first billion or two years, there was lots of junk floating around bumping into each other. And the stuff in the asteroid belt probably does come from that. But as I understand it, the planet collision theory seems to indicate that it would have been the collision of two larger, well formed planets.

If the planets were the size of Mercury (approx 3.3e23 kg) making a combined mass of 6.6e23 kg and if the best guess of the mass of the asteroid belt (2.9e21 kg) is more-or-less accurate, then 99.5% of the mass is gone, which seems a largish number to me.

Also, Mercury is approx 25 times more massive than Pluto which, I think, is more than just a little bit larger. If I were standing beside someone who weighed 1340 kg, I'd like to think that people would think that she was more than just a little bit bigger than me. <snicker>

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Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Albert Einstein

I just found this

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=asteroid%20belt&source=web&cd=7&ved=0CDcQFjAG&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.solstation.com%2Fstars%2Fasteroid.htm&ei=GVmCT6DQFsW08QPWuPCwBg&usg=AFQjCNGFv4iVscCtUV-Yz-bjvFoHZed6tQ

I need to go sleep,I finished work at 02:30 and I start again at 06:00 .
Well I suppose an hours sleep is better than none,but it catches up when you are doing 20
hour days !

john3760

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So we really think that stars and planets are objects which are being formed by means of bringing order out of chaos?

So goes with the elementary particles as well as galaxies and clusters of galaxies in the same way.

Again, going back to the asteroid belt in our own solar system as already being mentioned.

It occupies the middle region of the solar system, possible slightly closer to the Sun than that, but still spans a huge region of the solar system, both when it comes to different distances of the separate objects with relation to both the Sun and the Earth and the orbits they follow and the trajectories they take in order to make an orbit around the Sun.

Why not rather assume that the asteroid belt is the result of some kind of interaction between objects?

The Moon is supposed to be the result of a collision between the Earth and a Mars-sized object a very long time ago.

The resulting debris which orbited the Earth after this collision collapsed and contracted, creating the Moon as we see it today. For some reason the Earth itself survived this collision, but any life which may have existed at that time must have become extinct.

In the same way we do have interaction between stars orbiting each other.

A well-known example should be Epsilon Lyrae which make up a double-double pair of stars. Each pair is relatively close to each other, one having components very equal to each other, but now difficult with a 2.4 inch or 3-inch refractor. The other pair being slightly more different when it comes to the luminosities of the individual components, but having a wider separation.

Only the two different pairs of each double in this system appears as a wide pair, making it suitable for binoculars.

Gravity is supposed to create invisible waves, but more relevant is the matter which is pulled out of each star in such an interactive pair of orbiting stars which in theory could lead to the creation of planets.

But the Sun is not known to be having any companion stars on its own. There has been suggested that there may be an invisible or unknown brown dwarf in the solar system, but until now no such object is known to the astronomers.

Also a place where two or more stars are known to be orbiting each other in close proximity should not be assumed to be a place for intelligent life to evolve. Still we cannot exclude intelligent life forms around single stars belonging to systems like Alpha Centauri and Zeta Reticulii. The individual distances between each separate star in each system makes life possible because the individual stars may be regarded as suitable platforms or harbours for the creation of life because they may be having planets on their own.