The asteroid belt is found orbiting between Mars and Jupiter and is a vast collection of rocks that is thought to be a planet that never formed. When our Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago, the material in this region should have coalesced into a planet.

However, Jupiter's gravitational influence prevented this from happening, stirring up the region so that collisions became destructive rather than constructive. What remains today contains only about 3% of the Moon's mass scattered across millions of kilometres.

Jupiter's influence didn't stop there. Gravitational resonances – areas in space where the orbital periods of asteroids create regular interactions with Jupiter, Saturn , and even Mars – destabilise asteroid orbits, flinging fragments either toward the inner Solar

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