A new study provides evidence that meteorites were not the building blocks of planet formation but rather a result of the process.
Researchers at MIT and Purdue University created a series of computer simulations to determine if the meteorites were indeed responsible for planet formation or not. After multiple simulations, they discovered that a collision between two planetary bodies, such as a moon and an asteroid, with a speed of 2.5 kilometers per second, is strong enough to cause fractions to melt and be released in space.
The phenomenon described above that might have given birth to chondrules is called "impact jetting." Chondrules are the small, round granules believed to be the earlier form of terrestrial planets.
"This tells us that meteorites aren't actually representative of the material that formed planets - they're these smaller fractions of material that are the byproduct of planet formation," Brandon Johnson, a post-doctorate student in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, said in a press release. "But it also tells us the early solar system was more violent than we expected: You had these massive sprays of molten material getting ejected out from these really big impacts. It's an extreme process."
The researchers performed another simulation to compute the cooling rate of the chondrules for them to become meteorites after the impact. They found that after the dust from molten rocks were released into space, they would cool at 10 to 10,000 kelvins per hour.
The study was partly funded by NASA and scientists believe that it might rewrite what we know about the Solar System.
"This would be a major shift in how people think about our solar system," said Fred Ciesla, an associate professor of planetary science at the University of Chicago who was not part of the study. "If this finding is correct, then it would suggest that chondrites are not good analogs for the building blocks of the Earth and other planets."
The study was published in the Jan. 14 issue of the journal Nature.
