Scaling laws for the geometry of an impact-induced magma ocean

Abstract

Here, we develop scaling laws for (1) the distribution of impact-induced heat within the mantle and (2) shape of the impact-induced melt based on more than 100 smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) simulations. We use Legendre polynomials to describe these scaling laws and determine their coefficients by linear regression, minimizing the error between our model and SPH simulations. The input parameters are the impact angle $\theta$ ($0^{\circ },30^{\circ },60^{\circ }$, and $90^{\circ }$), total mass $M_T$ ($1M_{\mathrm{Mars}}-53M_{\mathrm{Mars}}$, where $M_{\mathrm{Mars}}$ is the mass of Mars), impact velocity $v_{\mathrm{imp}}$ ($v_{\mathrm{esc}}-2v_{\mathrm{esc}}$, where $v_{\mathrm{esc}}$ is the mutual escape velocity), and impactor-to-total mass ratio $\gamma$ ($0.03-0.5$). We find that the equilibrium pressure at the base of a melt pool can be higher (up to $\approx 80\%$) than those of radially-uniform global magma ocean models. This could have a significant impact on element partitioning. These melt scaling laws are publicly available on GitHub ($\text{href}$).

Published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters

References in corpus (4)

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• Formation of Phobos and Deimos via a Giant Impact
• SPH calculations of asteroid disruptions: The role of pressure dependent failure models
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