A wandering Jupiter stunted Mars’s growth and reshaped the asteroid belt

Mars is about half Earth ’s size and only a ten percent its hoi polloi , which does n’t make sense . By rights , Mars should be as big as Earth and Venus . Now we cognize why Mars is small … it ’s because Jupiter is a big bully .

That ’s the finding of a inquiry squad lead by Dr. Kevin Walsh of the Southwest Research Institute . The team run a series of simulation that present what would happen if Jupiter had go walkabout during the early solar day of the solar system . Based on our observation of other solar systems , we have good reason to believe that gargantuan gasoline planet do wander out of their orbits . While we do n’t know exactly why Jupiter move in the manner that it did , this raw theory provide the first cohesive account for why Mars is so small and why the asteroid whack is such a strange categorization of immensely different rocks .

Dr. Walsh explains how Jupiter might have moved about . For comfort of reference , “ AU ” refer to astronomical unit , which is simply the length from the Sun to Earth :

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“ If Jupiter had propel inwards from its birthplace down to 1.5 AU from the Sun , and then turned around when Saturn formed as other models indicate , finally migrating outwards towards its current location , it would have cut short the statistical distribution of solids in the inner solar system at about 1 AU and explained the small mass of Mars . The problem was whether the inbound and outward migration of Jupiter through the 2 to 4 AU region could be compatible with the existence of the asteroid belt today , in this same region . So , we start to do a huge telephone number of model . The result was fantastic . Our model not only record that the migration of Jupiter was consistent with the existence of the asteroid belt , but also explained properties of the belt never understood before . ”

The investigator call this the “ Grand Tack Scenario ” , which take it name from the fact that Jupiter on the spur of the moment overrule course of study when it was 1.5 AU from the Sun , like a sailboat tacking around a buoy . These simulations seem to explain how the asteroid bang gained its weirdly bifurcated composition , in which parts of the asteroid belt are almost completely wry , while others are comet - like orbs rich in water . Jupiter ’s movement through the belt would brought with it set of straggler from outside the asteroid belt , first comets from beyond the belt as Jupiter prompt inwards towards Mars , and then the wry rock and roll from inside the belt as it moved back outwards again .

ViaNature . Imagevia .

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