by It would appear that the so-called “great instability” event that caused chaos among the planets, sending the gas giants tending to space until they settled into the orbits we know today, which occurred between 60 and 100 million years after the birth of the Solar system. This is the conclusion of some careful scientific detective work involving a kind of meteorite to the an asteroid that the maauding planets once pushed around.
In addition, scientists believe the planets migrate – mainly Jupiter — the could formation of Worldand moon three orbits a Mars-size protoplanet called Theia. This destabilization may have prompted a collision with the Earth sending debris into space. It is this debris, according to scientists, that could have created the moon.
Related: What happened when the moon turned itself inside out billions of years ago?
Thanks to studies on the composition and locations of different types of asteroids and Comets, scientists know that the aforementioned carnage occurred early in the history of the solar system. Still, there are still some puzzles to be solved when it comes to how exactly everything went down.
For example, scientists understand that the objects in the solar system that we see today, including Earth, are formed around the sun from a disk of gas and dust. However, some of these objects, namely asteroids and comets, appear to be composed of material that was not present in the disk — at least, the material should not be present where the objects are. that’s right now. d to make sense of these things being closer to the sun before they spread further away. If Jupiter and the other giant planets migrated from where they were formedperhaps asteroids and comets could be as well.
In the young solar system, the four gas giant planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — they were nested closer together. Over time, gravitational interactions with planets outside of Neptune caused Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to migrate outward. Meanwhile, Jupiter drifted in, where scientists think it, in turn, was able to destabilize bodies in the inner solar system.
“The idea of this orbital instability is well established in the planetary community, but the timing of this instability is still a matter of debate,” planetary scientist Chrysa Avdellidou of the University of Leicester told Space.com .
Scientists call the theory behind this orbital instability the “Nice Model”, after the French city where the Côte d’Azur Observatory is located, where scientists first developed the idea. Initially, these scientists thought that this instability occurred between 500 and 800 million years after the the birth of the solar system. If true, that would coincide with an event called the Late Heavy Bombardment, in which the inner planets would have been picked up by comets that were released from their orbits thanks to migrating gas giants. However, the evidence has turned against the concept of the Late Heavy Bombardment, and scientists now think that the instability occurred no later than 100 million years after the formation of the solar system, based on the time when Jupiter could have trojan asteroids be accrued at L4 and L5. Lagrange points.
“People seem to agree that an instability like the Nice Model probably occurred less than 100 million years after the beginning of the solar system, but a few different camps are emerging,” Kevin Walsh of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder , Colorado, Space.com said. One camp argues that the instability would occur very quickly, within four million years of the birth of the solar system. The other camp thinks it happened later, after about 60 million years.
So Avdellidou, with the help of Walsh and other planetary scientists, set out to find an answer.
The team focused on a type of meteorite called chondrite enstatite EL, which has a low iron abundance and is very similar in composition and isotopic ratio to the material that formed Earth. This tells the scientists that the chondrites of Earth and the EL were probably condensed from the same part of the planet-forming disk.
However, it appears that the EL-chondrite parent body is no longer close to Earth. In fact, astronomical observations from ground-based telescopes have linked these meteorites to the Athor family of asteroids, which are found far away in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. For context, the Athor family and the EL chondrites were part of one large asteroid that was broken apart in a collision about 3 billion years ago, an event unrelated to the great instability.
Something should have scattered the generator of the Athor family into the asteroid belt, and that “something,” the team says, must have been the instability that caused Jupiter to stray. EL chondrites therefore make the perfect chronometers for this event as they should contain a clear record of what must have happened.
“Specifically, the thermal history of EL meteorites tells a rich story, constraining the size of the original parent body and the time it took to cool before breaking up,” Walsh said.
Using dynamical simulations, Avdellidou’s team was able to model the different scenarios of a migrating Jupiter, and concluded that Jupiter could have dispersed the Athor genus into the asteroid as early as 60 million years after the birth of the solar systems. Together with data about Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, scientists can now say that the great instability occurred between 60 million and 100 million years ago.
“Avdellidou specifically finds that the Nice Model itself – the giant planet’s orbits going wild for a short period of 10 or 20 million years – is the best and perhaps only time to launch asteroids into the region of the asteroid family this is Athor’s,” said Walsh.
And, interestingly, the collision between Earth and Theia that created the moon happened around this time period. “We understand that Theia had a massive collision with proto-Earth, which had a very similar composition,” Avdellidou said. “From sample studies [from the Moon] there are age estimates, and other colleagues have shown that this collision could be the result of the planet’s massive instability.”
Although there is no way to prove. “‘Proof’ is a strong statement and a difficult one when we discuss events 4.5 billion years ago,” said Avdellidou, although the scientist admits that the collision that created the Earth’s moon appears to have same time as the great instability.
Related Stories:
— A chunk of the ‘protoplanet’ that made the moon may be stuck near the Earth’s core
— The moon may be 40 million years older than we thought, according to Apollo 17 samples
– Moon rocks blasted off the surface of the moon could be near-Earth asteroids
“Our study put these events in a pretty tight time frame,” Avdellidou said. Although it may not be possible to definitively prove that Jupiter had a hand in the formation of the Moon, the evidence is certainly suggestive.
So, the next time you look up at the silvery face of the moon in our night sky, think of it as a legacy from the early solar system when Jupiter was orbiting it.
The results were published on April 16 in the journal Scienceand presented at the General Assembly of the European Geological Union in Vienna.
