Yet many remained, and are still with us today: a small planet (and maybe more than one), icy planetesimals that orbit in the frozen realm beyond the planets, and giant boulders closer to the Sun, including some that cross Earth’s orbit, presenting a potential threat to our planet.
All of these objects are important to astronomers because they help tell the full story of how the solar system formed and how it evolved. They also help scientists interpret their observations of other star systems, where big disks of material may be giving birth to planets.
Most of these leftovers orbit beyond Neptune, the most distant of the solar system’s eight “major” planets. They formed from the disk of gas and dust that surrounded the newborn Sun. Small particles clumped together to form larger pieces, called planetesimals. These, in turn, merged to form the planets themselves.
After the planets were formed, their gravity hurled most of the remaining planetesimals into the Sun or into distant orbits around it. Billions of these icy leftovers orbit in the Kuiper Belt, which is just outside Neptune’s orbit, or in the Oort Cloud, which is much more distant. Occasionally, the orbit of one of these bodies is disturbed and it falls toward the Sun, where it becomes a comet, with a long, glowing tail.
The other major group of leftovers is the asteroids. Millions of them orbit the Sun in a wide belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. They probably were prevented from merging to form a planet by Jupiter’s powerful gravity. The largest asteroid is about one-quarter the size of the Moon.
Many other asteroids follow orbits that bring them into the realm of the inner planets, including several thousand large ones that cross Earth’s orbit. If one of these objects hit Earth it could devastate life on our planet, so astronomers are trying to locate all of the potentially dangerous ones and plot their orbits.
Comets and asteroids also present potential resources for future generations as they expand into the solar system. Many asteroids are rich in iron and nickel, and also contain smaller quantities of other metals. Comets and many asteroids are good sources of water, too. (Some scientists believe that much of the water on Earth came from comets.)
Using resources from these objects could reduce the cost of exploring and colonizing the solar system, and present the ultimate case of recycling: reusing the leftovers from the birth of the solar system.