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Re: an uncomplicated question

At 10:41 AM 1/22/87 -0500, you wrote:
>Since the 'chunks' tend to have little respect for each other's survival
>within the group, knocking about  in random paths (other than the orbit,
>of course), would it not stand to reason that many have  been knocked
>out of orbit over time and that the number of original members will
>never be determined? jj   (My apologies.  I erroneously sent my reply to
>Mark Abott instead of the list.)   And having re-read my own message, it
>seems this qualifies as a truism.
>
>
Well, this is getting into an area where I would be going on gut instinct
or guessing (I majored in astrophysics in college, but that was almost 20
years ago... and now I only keep in touch via Sky & Telescope and a few
other magazines). My gut instinct is that an order of magnitude estimate
can be made, based on 
	the age of the solar system, 
	a distribution of chunkc of rocks in the region of the asteroid belt, 	how
the chunks would interact with one another and 
	how they would be influenced by the gravitation of the other planets.
Run your computer simulation with various initial conditions, and see which
conditions would produce what we currently see.
Another place to post this question might be the Astrophysics email list
which you can subscribe to by sending a message to 
    astrophysics-request@lists.best.com
with 
    subscribe 
as the body of the message.


Mark Abbott
Printware, Inc.
1270 Eagan Industrial Road
Eagan, MN  55121
Phone:  (612) 456-1473
E-mail: mra@printwareinc.com