![]() The current asteroid belt is believed to contain only a small fraction of the mass of the primordial belt. ![]() The asteroids have undergone considerable evolution since their formation, including internal heating (in the first few tens of millions of years), surface melting from impacts, space weathering from radiation, and bombardment by micrometeorites. As a result, 99.9% of the asteroid belt's original mass was lost in the first 100 million years of the Solar System's history. Collisions became too violent, and instead of fusing together, the planetesimals and most of the protoplanets shattered. Between Mars and Jupiter, however, gravitational perturbations from Jupiter imbued the protoplanets with too much orbital energy for them to accrete into a planet. Planetesimals are the smaller precursors of the protoplanets. ![]() The asteroid belt formed from the primordial solar nebula as a group of planetesimals. ![]()
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