—A new analysis suggests that it didn’t (naturalistically, at least).
Evolutionary astronomers allege that the solar system formed about 4.5 billion years ago and scientists have for a very long time been trying to model that formation process using powerful computer simulations. New research has shown that the inner rocky planets and the asteroid belt in our solar system cannot simultaneously form naturalistically.
An online news article from the journal Nature discusses this new research, stating:1
Standard planet-formation models have been unable to reconstruct the distributions of the Solar System’s small, rocky planets and asteroids in the same simulation. (emphasis added)
Figure 1: Schematic of the inner planets and asteroid belt in the solar system. Actual solar system (a) and simulated inner solar systems (b & c). From Ref. 1.
