The belt of asteroids between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars were a collection of space debris pulled into our solar system by the larger planets before they settled into their current trajectories, says new research, and were likely not the remains of a planet that never formed, as has been long believed.

A new study by Francesca DeMeo of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Benoit Carry of Paris Observatory suggests that, as the solar system was forming, the orbits of the gas giants, Jupiter in particular, were much more dynamic than they are now.

So, as the planets traveled through the early solar system, they picked up and carried along an array of asteroids and other material.

The new research was published in the Jan. 30 issue of the journal Nature.

DeMeo and Curry say their recent findings indicate the movement of Jupiter, which passed as close to the Sun as Mars does now, could have ripped away all but a tenth of one percent of the material found in the original asteroid belt.

As the giant planets migrated through the beginning solar system, they redirected objects located as close to the sun as Mercury and as far away as Neptune into the region where many of the asteroids are found today.

"We found that the giant planets shook up the asteroids like flakes in a snow globe," said DeMeo. "The asteroid belt is a melting pot of objects arriving from diverse locations and background."

DeMeo and Carry studied data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a cosmological mapping project involving about 150 scientists at institutions around the world, and honed on the compositions of thousands of objects in the asteroid belt.

The team found the materials making up the asteroids, especially the smaller ones, were much more diverse than scientists previously thought.

DeMeo and Curry's work seems to add support to the recent theory that asteroid impacts, a result of the bigger planets propelling asteroids toward Earth, carried most of the Blue Planet's water at the start of its formation.