Convergent migration model’s ability to explain the asteroid belt

Determine whether the convergent migration model—where planetary embryos migrate into a convergence zone around Earth’s orbit during the gas-disk phase—can explain the present-day asteroid belt.

Background

The convergent migration model proposes that, within the Sun’s gaseous disk, a convergence zone near Earth’s orbit drew the most massive planetary embryos inward, while smaller embryos remained on the fringes. This mechanism can produce Earth and Venus as the most massive terrestrial planets clustered near 1 au, with Mercury and Mars at the outskirts.

Although simulations can match the terrestrial planets under this framework, the model’s capacity to also reproduce the asteroid belt’s properties remains uncertain, motivating explicit tests of whether this migration-driven assembly is compatible with the belt’s observed mass and structure.