system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Could the asteroid belt ever form into another planet?

I know how planets form, but could the asteroid belt ever theoretically form into a new planet, or is there something about the gravitational pull of Jupiter and/or Mars that is keeping it from occurring?
gpt
There's not nearly enough mass there. The whole thing has less than a fifth of the mass of Pluto.

One might ask, then, if it could form a *dwarf* planet … and the answer is it already has. It's called Ceres. Ceres accounts for more than half the mass of the *entire* asteroid belt.

There's a theory that the belt was previously considerably more massive — hundreds of times more massive — but that mass has been scattered over the aeons by the gravitational influence of the other planets. That may be true and it may not, but the bottom line is that the mass that's *currently* there is far too small to form a planet.