Might have been asked before but got bit high and started wondering random stuff haha
In: Physics
But asteroids that hit planets do become part of those planets… The same is true when they hit moons.
This is assuming they aren’t big enough and fast enough to destroy the planet.
In the case of our solar system Jupiter prevented any planet from forming between Mars and Jupiter. Jupiter is just so massive that in the early solar system its gravity caused caused these early planetesimals to speed up and the vast majority of the early asteroid belt’s mass (99.9%) was ejected from the solar system. The mass of the asteroid belt nowadays is very small: around 4% of our Moon. Jupiter still messes with the asteroid belts. There are regions within the asteroid belts where this is a lack of asteroids because of Jupiter.
It does happen, the problem is a) it happens on a really large time scale, and b), the asteroid s and such that still exist are the outliers that has the mass, positions, and velocities that uniquely causes them not to collide with anything. Aka they were the weird cases.
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