Other
Scientific paper
Nov 1999
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999m%26ps...34..897w&link_type=abstract
Meteoritics & Planetary Science, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 897-907 (1999).
Other
36
Scientific paper
Motivated by recent observations of T Tauri stars and the interpretation of these observations in terms of the properties of circumstellar disks, we derive internal (midplane) temperatures for disks around mature (age ~ 1 million years) T Tauri stars. The estimates are obtained by combining published results for disk masses, sizes, accretion rates and surface temperatures. For 26 stars for which adequate data are available, we derive midplane temperatures at 1 AU primarily in the range 200 - 800 K, and 100 - 400 K at 2.5 AU. It is likely that the solar nebula, at the same stage of evolution, contained planetesimals and objects destined to become meteorite parent bodies. Observations of young stellar objects at earlier stages of evolution (age ~ 0.1 million years) imply that accretion rates were, on the average, at least two orders of magnitude greater than the 10-8 M( /y rates typical for mature T Tauri stars. Such high values would result in midplane temperatures at or near the silicate vaporization temperature in the terrestrial planet region. If cooling of the solar nebula from such a hot epoch was responsible for establishing the pervasive elemental fractionation patterns found in chondritic meteorites, then objects in the asteroid belt must have grown rapidly (within 0.1 million years) to sizes of about 1 km, a conclusion consistent with current theories of planetesimal formation. However, the fact that primitive meteorite parent bodies escaped being melted by the decay of 26Al then implies that further growth of at least some objects was essentially delayed for two million years or more. Such a diminished growth rate appears to be consistent with simulations of the dynamics of solid bodies in the asteroid belt. Other hypotheses seem less attractive. One might assume that the final cooling occurred only after the decay of 26Al (i.e., more than a million years after CAI formation), or that 26Al was not ubiquitous in the early solar system. But the first of these conjectures is incompatible with astronomical observations of T Tauri systems, and the second appears to be contradicted by the evidence for 26Al in diverse meteoritic components. The remaining alternative would then appear to be that, despite a lack of supporting evidence, chondritic fractionation patterns reflect the net effect of many local heating and cooling events, and have nothing to do with global nebular cooling. We conclude that the most plausible hypothesis is that both nebular cooling and coagulation of solids to kilometer-sized objects occurred rapidly and that a substantial number of planetesimals in the asteroid belt remained smaller than a few kilometers in radius for at least two million years.
Cassen Patrick
Woolum Dorothy S.
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