Fakultät für Physik und Astronomie
STEPHEN PHILLIPS hostreviews.co.uk / UNSPLASH

Asteroid Vesta and Jupiter's formation: an astrochemical tale

Diego Turrini , INAF-IAPS Rom, Italy

The first few millions of years of the life of the Solar System, when the young Sun was surrounded by its protoplanetary disk, is a period extremely difficult to investigate and of which we still know very little. Advancements in theoretical models of planetary formation have highlighted the existence of different paths for the formation of the first generations of solid bodies, starting from different formation environments and resulting in different final properties. In parallel, they also highlighted how the formation of giant planets and their orbital migration played a major role in determining how violent the dynamical and collisional evolution of the young Solar System was. As a result, not only the number of proposed formation scenarios has dramatically increased, but even formation scenarios based on extremely different evolutionary paths appear capable of producing final outcomes quite similar to the current Solar System. Luckily for us asteroid Vesta, one of the two targets of the NASA mission Dawn, offers the key to solve this conundrum. Dawn confirmed Vesta's volcanic crust as the source of a specific family of meteorites, the Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite meteorites (also known collectively as HEDs) and this 'genetic' link reveals that Vesta is one of the most ancient bodies in the Solar System and witnessed the appearance of its giant planets. Together, the HEDs and Dawn tell us two important facts about Vesta. The first one is that the impacts it experienced over the whole life of the Solar System could not destroy its volcanic crust and expose the underlying mantle. The second one is that the early impacts that occurred when the young crust was still partially molten delivered only limited amounts of exogenous materials, most importantly water and metals, to it. Using the formation of Jupiter as a case study, in this talk I'll show how the joint use of these two pieces of information provides a new astrochemical constraint against which to test and quantitatively compare the different scenarios for the formation of the Solar System and the evolution of its protoplanetary disk. Finally, I'll show how the hindsight gained through the study of the Solar System can be applied to investigating circumstellar disks hosting young giant planets around other stars.

Heidelberg Joint Astronomical Colloquium
27 Nov 2018, 16:15
Philosophenweg 12, Großer Hörsaal

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