Cosmic-ray Exposure Ages of Meteorites

Details Cosmic-ray Exposure Ages of Meteorites Cosmic-ray Exposure Ages of Meteorites

Dec 2003

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2003trgeo...1..347h&link_type=abstract

Treatise on Geochemistry, Volume 1. Editor: Andrew M. Davis. Executive Editors: Heinrich D. Holland and Karl K. Turekian. pp. 71

Mathematics

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Scientific paper

The classic idea of a cosmic-ray exposure (CRE) age for a meteorite is based on a simple but useful picture of meteorite evolution, the one-stage irradiation model. The precursor rock starts out on a parent body, buried under a mantle of material many meters thick that screens out cosmic rays. At a time ti, a collision excavates a precursor rock - a "meteoroid." The newly liberated meteoroid, now fully exposed to cosmic rays, orbits the Sun until a time tf, when it strikes the Earth, where the overlying blanket of air (and possibly of water or ice) again shuts out almost all cosmic rays (cf. Masarik and Reedy, 1995). The quantity tf-ti is called the CRE age, t. To obtain the CRE age of a meteorite, we measure the concentrations in it of one or more cosmogenic nuclides (Table 1), which are nuclides that cosmic rays produce by inducing nuclear reactions. Many shorter-lived radionuclides excluded from Table 1 such as 22Na (t1/2=2.6 yr) and 60Co (t1/2=5.27 yr) can also furnish valuable information, but can be measured only in meteorites that fell within the last few half-lives of those nuclides (see, e.g., Leya et al. (2001) and references therein). Table 1. Cosmogenic nuclides used for calculating exposure ages NuclideHalf-lifea (Myr) Radionuclides 14C0.005730 59Ni0.076 41Ca0.1034 81Kr0.229 36Cl0.301 26Al0.717 10Be1.51 53Mn3.74 129I15.7 Stable nuclides 3He 21Ne 38Ar 83Kr 126Xe a http://www2.bnl.gov/ton. CRE ages have implications for several interrelated questions. From how many different parent bodies do meteorites come? How well do meteorites represent the population of the asteroid belt? How many distinct collisions on each parent body have created the known meteorites of each type? How often do asteroids collide? How big and how energetic were the collisions that produced meteoroids? What factors control the CRE age of a meteorite and how do meteoroid orbits evolve through time? We will touch on these questions below as we examine the data.By 1975, the CRE ages of hundreds of meteorites had been estimated from noble gas measurements. Histograms of the CRE age distributions pointed to several important observations.(i) The CRE ages of meteorites increase in the order stones

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