[1]Gas giant Jupiter may have robbed the mass of its neighbouring planet Mars and built the strange icy rocky asteroid belt billions of years ago when the solar system was forming, a new study has suggested.
The unexpectedly smaller size of Mars and the strange asteroid belt located between the orbits of the red planet and its neighbour Jupiter have long puzzled scientists. Now, an international team of scientists claimed to have found an explanation by carrying out computer simulations of the early solar system.
Their research showed that some 4.6 billion years ago when the solar system was forming, Jupiter went wandering in towards the sun, on the way dragging comets from beyond the asteroid belt as it moved inwards towards Mars.
It then moved out again to gravitate towards another gas giant, Saturn, as it formed, this time dragging dry rocks from inside the belt as it moved back outwards again.
All this material would otherwise have coalesced with Mars, giving it water in abundance and the mass to retain it with its gravitational pull. Instead it ended up as the small, dry and probably dead planet as seen today, the Daily Mail reported. The team, led by Dr Kevin Walsh of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, found how an infant Jupiter may have migrated to within 1.5 astronomical units (AU — the distance from the sun to the earth) of the sun, stripping a lot of material from the region and essentially starving Mars of formation materials.
“If Jupiter had moved inwards from its birthplace down to 1.5 AU from the sun, and then turned around when Saturn formed as other models suggest, eventually migrating outwards towards its current location, it would have truncated the distribution of solids in the solar system at about 1 AU and explained small mass of Mars,” said Dr Walsh.
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[1] http://103.241.136.51/newsmjpg-380