Other
Scientific paper
Jul 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006psrd.repte.107b&link_type=abstract
Planetary Science Research Discoveries
Other
Asteroid, Meteorite, Iron, Iron Meteorite, Main Belt, Differentiation, Terrestrial Planet, Differentiated Asteroid, Parent Body
Scientific paper
Iron meteorites are fragments from the cores of small differentiated asteroids (20-200 kilometers in diameter) that formed very early in Solar System history. They are commonly assumed to have originated in the same region as most stony meteorite parent bodies, namely the main asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter. A new paper in the journal Nature by William Bottke, David Nesvorny, and Robert Grimm (Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado) along with Alessandro Morbidelli and David O'Brien (Observatoire de la Cote d'Azure, Nice, France), however, finds that the iron meteorites may have come from a different and possibly much more intriguing place. According to their numerical simulations that tracked the dynamical evolution of Moon- to Mars-sized planetary embryos interacting with tens of thousands of test bodies during the first 10 million years of Solar System evolution, many iron meteorite parent bodies formed and fragmented in the same region where Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are found today. The fast accretion times of planetesimals in this zone allowed heat produced by the decay of short-lived radioactive isotopes like aluminum-26 to melt and differentiate many of these objects into core, mantle, and crust. At the same time, gravitational interactions with planetary embryos increased their mutual impact velocities, enough that these planetesimals broke apart when they struck one another. The net result was the production of millions of fragments continually jostled about by planetary embryos. Over millions of years, a small fraction of this differentiated debris was scattered into the innermost region of the main belt, where it then stayed for billions of years until chance collisional and dynamical events sent it on a crash course to Earth. Bottke and colleagues' prediction of these asteroid main belt gatecrashers could mean that some of the iron meteorites we hold in our hands today are pieces of the same precursor fabric that formed the Earth and other terrestrial planets.
Bottke William F.
Martel Linda M. V.
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