The Formation of Jupiter, the Jovian Early Bombardment and the Delivery of Water to the Asteroid Belt: The Case of (4) Vesta

Abstract

The asteroid (4) Vesta, parent body of the Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite meteorites, is one of the first bodies that formed, mostly from volatile-depleted material, in the Solar System. The Dawn mission recently provided evidence that hydrated material was delivered to Vesta, possibly in a continuous way, over the last 4 Ga, while the study of the eucritic meteorites revealed a few samples that crystallized in presence of water and volatile elements. The formation of Jupiter and probably its migration occurred in the period when eucrites crystallized, and triggered a phase of bombardment that caused icy planetesimals to cross the asteroid belt. In this work, we study the flux of icy planetesimals on Vesta during the Jovian Early Bombardment and, using hydrodynamic simulations, the outcome of their collisions with the asteroid. We explore how the migration of the giant planet would affect the delivery of water and volatile materials to the asteroid and we discuss our results in the context of the geophysical and collisional evolution of Vesta. In particular, we argue that the observational data are best reproduced if the bulk of the impactors was represented by 1-2 km wide planetesimals and if Jupiter underwent a limited (a fraction of au) displacement.

31 pages, 11 figures, and 3 tables. Published in the special issue "Planet Formation and the Rise of Life" on the journal Life. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1309.1398

References in corpus (5)

• Building Terrestrial Planets
• Towards planetesimals: dense chondrule clumps in the protoplanetary nebula
• Jovian Early Bombardment: planetesimal erosion in the inner asteroid belt
• The contamination of the surface of Vesta by impacts and the delivery of the dark material
• Meteoritical and dynamical constraints on the growth mechanisms and formation times of asteroids and Jupiter

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Origin of water in the inner Solar System: Planetesimals scattered inward during Jupiter and Saturn's rapid gas accretion
• Tracing the formation history of giant planets in protoplanetary disks with Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen and Sulphur
• The consequences of planetary migration on the minor bodies of the early Solar System
• The Comparative Exploration of the Ice Giant Planets with Twin Spacecraft: Unveiling the History of our Solar System
• The contribution of the ARIEL space mission to the study of planetary formation
• The role of planetary formation and evolution in shaping the composition of exoplanetary atmospheres
• Dust-to-gas ratio resurgence in circumstellar disks due to the formation of giant planets: the case of HD 163296
• Exogenous origin of hydration on asteroid (16) Psyche: The role of hydrated asteroid families
• Olivine on Vesta as exogenous contaminants brought by impacts: Constraints from modeling Vesta's collisional history and from impact simulations
• Origin and dynamical evolution of the asteroid belt
• Detection of a 2.85 micrometer Feature on 5 Spinel-rich Asteroids from JWST
• The late accretion and erosion of Vesta's crust recorded by eucrites and diogenites as an astrochemical window into the formation of Jupiter and the early evolution of the Solar System
• HD 163296 and its Giant Planets: Creation of Exo-comets, Interstellar Objects and Transport of Volatile Material
• Asteroid 4 Vesta: dynamical and collisional evolution during the Late Heavy Bombardment
• Chondrule formation by collisions of planetesimals containing volatiles triggered by Jupiter's formation
• Mercury-Ar$\chi$es: a high-performance n-body code for planet formation studies