Formation and Dynamical Evolution of the Asteroid Belt

Asteroids are critical to our desire to unravel the origin of the Solar System because they supply unique, relatively pristine snapshots of the environment in which the Earth formed and evolved. This is due to the fact that, although the asteroids and Earth have followed very different evolutionary pathways, they all formed from the same set of physical processes and share a common ancestry. The asteroid belt presents a particular challenge to understanding terrestrial planet formation because of its small mass. Models of the protoplanetary disk suggest the region between 2-3 AU should contain roughly 3 Earth masses, while less than 0.001 of an Earth mass is actually found there.A long-standing explanation for the asteroid belt's small mass is that it is due to the gravitational influence of Jupiter and Saturn. Some have suggested protoplanets grew there before they were dynamically removed from the asteroid belt by resonances with the gas giants. This left the asteroid belt dynamically excited (which is observed) and heavily depleted in mass. More recently, however, detailed models have shown that this process produces an asteroid belt that is inconsistent with observations.Two recent models propose new ways to match asteroid belt constraints. The first, the so-called ‘Grand Tack’ scenario, uses the results of hydrodynamic simulations to show that Jupiter (and Saturn) migrated both inward and outward across the asteroid belt while interacting with the protoplanetary gas disk. The Grand Tack not only reproduces the mass and mixture of spectral types in the asteroid belt, but it also truncates the planetesimal disk from which the terrestrial planets form, potentially explaining why Mars is less massive than Earth. In a second scenario, planetesimals that form directly from cm- to meter-sized objects, known as “pebbles”, are rapidly converted to 100 to 1000 km asteroid-like object that subsequently grow by accreting even more pebbles. Pebble accretion models can also reproduce the basic structure of the inner Solar System, including a small Mars and a low-mass asteroid belt. Here we will discuss how asteroid studies can tell us about Solar System evolution.