Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-r7xzm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T21:03:05.480Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The origin and evolution of stony meteorites

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2005

William F. Bottke
Affiliation:
Southwest Research Institute, 1050 Walnut St., Suite 400, Boulder, CO 80302, USA W. F. Bottke's email: bottke@boulder.swri.edu
D. Durda
Affiliation:
Southwest Research Institute, 1050 Walnut St., Suite 400, Boulder, CO 80302, USA W. F. Bottke's email: bottke@boulder.swri.edu
D. Nesvorný
Affiliation:
Southwest Research Institute, 1050 Walnut St., Suite 400, Boulder, CO 80302, USA W. F. Bottke's email: bottke@boulder.swri.edu
R. Jedicke
Affiliation:
Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822
A. Morbidelli
Affiliation:
Obs. de la Côte d'Azur, B.P. 4229, 06034 Nice Cedex 4, France
D. Vokrouhlický
Affiliation:
Institute of Astronomy, Charles University, V Holešovičkách 2, 180 00 Prague
H. Levison
Affiliation:
Southwest Research Institute, 1050 Walnut St., Suite 400, Boulder, CO 80302, USA W. F. Bottke's email: bottke@boulder.swri.edu
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

The origin of stony meteorites landing on Earth today is directly linked to the history of the main belt, which evolved both through collisional evolution and dynamical evolution/depletion. In this paper, we focus our attention on the main belt dynamical evolution scenario discussed in Petit et al. (2001). According to Petit et al., during the planet formation epoch, the primordial main belt contained several Earth masses of material, enough to allow the asteroids to accrete on relatively short timescales.

After a few My, the accretion of planetary embryos in the main belt zone dynamically stirred the remaining planetesimals to high enough velocities to initiate fragmentation. After a short interval, perhaps as long as 10 My, the primordial main belt was dynamically depleted of $>99$% of its material via the combined perturbations of the planetary embryos and a newly-formed Jupiter. The small percentage of objects that survived in the main belt zone became the asteroid belt. It has been shown that the wavy-shaped size-frequency distribution of the main belt is a “fossil” left over from this violent period (Bottke et al. 2004).

Using a collisional/dynamical model of this scenario, we tracked the evolution of stony meteoroids produced by catastrophic disruption events over the last several Gy. We show that most stony meteoroids are a byproduct of a collisional cascade derived from large and ancient asteroid families or smaller, more recent breakup events. The meteoroids are then delivered to Earth by drifting in semimajor axis via Yarkovsky thermal drag forces until they reach a resonance powerful enough to place them on an Earth-crossing orbit.To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
© 2005 International Astronomical Union