Earth’s gravitational forces can tear dangerous asteroids to shreds

Scientists then realised that these strange celestial bodies could be fragments of larger asteroids. The researchers took into account a scenario in which asteroids colliding with rocky planets lost 50 to 90 per cent of their mass, forming a stream of fragments, in which case the model showed all the missing asteroids. Additional simulations showed that such fragments could remain in the solar system for up to 9 million years, after which they could collide with the Sun, a planet, or leave the system altogether.