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Main Authors: Herbst, William, Greenwood, James P.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12534
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author Herbst, William
Greenwood, James P.
author_facet Herbst, William
Greenwood, James P.
contents Chondrules probably formed during a small window of time $\sim$1-4 Ma after CAIs, when most solid matter in the asteroid belt was already in the form of km-sized planetesimals. They are unlikely, therefore, to be ``building blocks" of planets or abundant on asteroids, but more likely to be a product of energetic events common in the asteroid belt at that epoch. Laboratory experiments indicate that they could have formed when solids of primitive composition were heated to temperatures of $\sim$1600 K and then cooled for minutes to hours. A plausible heat source for this is magma, which is likely to have been abundant in the asteroid belt at that time, and only that time, due to the trapping of $^{26}$Al decay energy in planetesimal interiors. Here we propose that chondrules formed during low-speed ($\lesssim1$ km s$^{-1}$) collisions between large planetesimals when heat from their interiors was released into a stream of primitive debris from their surfaces. Heating would have been essentially instantaneous and cooling would have been on the dynamical time scale, 1/$\sqrt(G ρ) \sim 30$ minutes, where $ρ$ is the mean density of a planetesimal. Many of the heated fragments would have remained gravitationally bound to the merged object and could have suffered additional heating events as they orbited and ultimately accreted to its surface. This is a hybrid of the splash and flyby models: we propose that it was the energy released from a body's molten interior, not its mass, that was responsible for chondrule formation by heating primitive debris that emerged from the collision.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_12534
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Chondrule Formation During Low-Speed Collisions of Planetesimals: A Hybrid Splash-Flyby Framework
Herbst, William
Greenwood, James P.
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Geophysics
Chondrules probably formed during a small window of time $\sim$1-4 Ma after CAIs, when most solid matter in the asteroid belt was already in the form of km-sized planetesimals. They are unlikely, therefore, to be ``building blocks" of planets or abundant on asteroids, but more likely to be a product of energetic events common in the asteroid belt at that epoch. Laboratory experiments indicate that they could have formed when solids of primitive composition were heated to temperatures of $\sim$1600 K and then cooled for minutes to hours. A plausible heat source for this is magma, which is likely to have been abundant in the asteroid belt at that time, and only that time, due to the trapping of $^{26}$Al decay energy in planetesimal interiors. Here we propose that chondrules formed during low-speed ($\lesssim1$ km s$^{-1}$) collisions between large planetesimals when heat from their interiors was released into a stream of primitive debris from their surfaces. Heating would have been essentially instantaneous and cooling would have been on the dynamical time scale, 1/$\sqrt(G ρ) \sim 30$ minutes, where $ρ$ is the mean density of a planetesimal. Many of the heated fragments would have remained gravitationally bound to the merged object and could have suffered additional heating events as they orbited and ultimately accreted to its surface. This is a hybrid of the splash and flyby models: we propose that it was the energy released from a body's molten interior, not its mass, that was responsible for chondrule formation by heating primitive debris that emerged from the collision.
title Chondrule Formation During Low-Speed Collisions of Planetesimals: A Hybrid Splash-Flyby Framework
topic Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Geophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.12534