Seven years earlier, the Swedes had developed a model that calculated the trajectories of asteroids of different sizes to determine their numbers at different distances from the Sun. They compared the results obtained by their model with observations of celestial bodies for seven years, and realized that they had undercounted some small asteroids at a distance comparable to the orbits of Earth and Venus.
Then the scientists realized that these strange celestial bodies could be fragments of larger asteroids. The researchers took into account a scenario in which asteroids that collided with rocky planets lost 50 to 90% 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.
