Late Heavy Bombardment
Encyclopedia
The Late Heavy Bombardment (commonly referred to as the lunar cataclysm, or LHB) is a period of time approximately 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago (Ga) during which a large number of impact craters are believed to have formed on the Moon
, and by inference on Earth
, Mercury
, Venus
, and Mars
as well. The LHB is "late" only in relation to the main period of accretion
, when the Earth and the other three rocky planets first formed, and gained the majority of their material; in relation to Earth history as a whole it is still a fairly early phase. The evidence for this event comes primarily from the dating of lunar samples, which indicates that most impact melt rocks formed in this rather narrow interval of time. While many hypotheses have been put forth to explain a "spike" in the flux of either asteroidal or cometary materials to the inner solar system, no consensus yet exists as to its cause. The Nice model
popular among planetary scientists
postulates that the gas giant
planets migrated in orbit at this time, causing objects in the asteroid belt
and/or Kuiper belt
to be put onto eccentric orbits that reached the terrestrial planet
s. Nevertheless, some argue that the lunar sample data do not require a cataclysmic cratering event near 3.9 Ga, and that the apparent clustering of impact melt ages near this time is an artifact of sampling material affected by a single large impact basin.
of impact melt rocks that were collected during the Apollo missions. The majority of these impact melts are believed to have formed during the collision of asteroids or comets tens of kilometers across, forming impact craters hundreds of kilometers in diameter. The Apollo 15
, 16
, and 17
landing sites were chosen as a result of their proximity to the Imbrium
, Nectaris
, and Serenitatis
basins.
Under study on Earth, the ages of impact melts collected at these sites clustered between about 3.8 and 4.1 Ga. The apparent clustering of ages of these was first noticed in the mid-1970s by Fouad Tera, Dimitri Papanastassiou, and Gerald Wasserburg who postulated that the ages record an intense bombardment of the Moon. They called it the "lunar cataclysm" and proposed that it represented a dramatic increase in the rate of bombardment of the Moon around 3.9 Ga. If these impact melts were derived from these three basins, then not only did these three prominent impact basins form within a short interval of time, but so did many others based on stratigraphic
grounds. At the time, the conclusion was considered controversial.
As more data has become available, particularly from lunar meteorites, this theory, while still controversial, has gained in popularity. The lunar meteorites are believed to randomly sample the lunar surface, and at least some of these should have originated from regions far from the Apollo landing sites. Many of the feldspathic
lunar meteorites probably originated from the lunar far side, and impact melts within these have recently been dated. Consistent with the cataclysm hypothesis, none of their ages was found to be older than about 3.9 Ga. Nevertheless, the ages do not "cluster" at this date, but span between 2.5 and 3.9 Ga.
Studies of the highland crater size distributions suggest that the same family of projectiles struck Mercury and the Moon during late heavy bombardment. If the history of decay of late heavy bombardment on Mercury also followed the history of late heavy bombardment on the Moon, the youngest large basin discovered, Caloris
, is comparable in age to the youngest large lunar basins, Orientale and Imbrium, and all of the plains units are older than 3 billion years.
The first criticism concerns the origin of the impact melt rocks that were sampled at the Apollo landing sites. While these impact melts have been commonly attributed to having been derived from the closest basin, it has been argued that a large portion of these might instead be derived from the Imbrium basin. The Imbrium impact basin is the youngest and largest of the multi-ring basins found on the central nearside of the Moon, and quantitative modeling shows that significant amounts of ejecta from this event should be present at all of the Apollo landing sites. According to this alternative hypothesis, the cluster of impact melt ages near 3.9 Ga simply reflects material being collected from a single impact event, Imbrium, and not several.
A second criticism concerns the significance of the lack of impact melt rocks older than about 4.1 Ga. One hypothesis for this observation that does not involve a cataclysm is that old melt rocks did exist, but that their ages have all been reset by the continuous effects of impact cratering over the past 4 billion years. Furthermore, it is possible that these putative samples could all have been pulverized to such small sizes that it is impossible to obtain age determinations using standard radiometric methods.
Serious environmental damage would occur about every 100 years, although life is not known to have existed on Earth at this time.
Prior to the introduction of the Late Heavy Bombardment theory, it was generally assumed that the Earth had remained molten until about 3.8 Ga. This date could be found in all of the oldest known rocks from around the world, and appeared to represent a strong "cutoff point" beyond which older rocks could not be found. These dates remained fairly constant even across various dating methods, including the system considered the most accurate and least affected by environment, uranium-lead dating
of zircon
s. As no older rocks could be found, it was generally assumed that the Earth had remained molten until this point in time, which defined the boundary between the earlier Hadean
and later Archean
eons.
Older rocks could be found, however, in the form of chips off asteroid
s that fall to Earth as meteorites. Like the rocks on Earth, asteroids also show a strong cutoff point, at about 4.6 Ga, which is assumed to be the time when the first solids formed in the protoplanetary disk
around the then-young Sun. The Hadean, then, was the period of time between the formation of these early rocks in space, and the eventual solidification of the Earth's crust, some 700 million years later. This time would include the accretion of the planets from the disk and its slow cooling into a solid as the gravitational potential energy of this collapse was released.
Later calculations showed that the rate of collapse and cooling was dependent on the size of the body, and applying this to an Earth-sized mass suggested this should have happened quite quickly, as quickly as 100 million years. The difference between measurement and theory was something of a mystery at the time.
The Late Heavy Bombardment is now offered as an explanation of this oddity. Under this model, the rocks dating to 3.8 Ga represent those that were solidifying after much of the crust was destroyed by the Bombardment. The Acasta Gneiss
in the North American cratonic shield and gneisses within the Jack Hills
portion of the Narryer Gneiss Terrane in Western Australia are, collectively, the oldest continental fragments on Earth and do not predate the late heavy bombardment. The oldest mineral yet dated on Earth, a zircon from Jack Hills, predates this event but may simply be a fragment of crust left over from this event, contained within a much younger (~3800 Ma old) rock. Some geologists believe they have found 4.28 billion year old rock in Quebec, Canada, though.
This has led to something of a revolution in the understanding of the earliest stages of Earth's history during the Hadean. Older references generally show the Hadean Earth having a molten surface with prominent volcano
s, for instance Hadean time. The name referred to the "hellish" conditions assumed on Earth for the time. It is now believed that the Hadean surface was solid, temperate, and water covered (albeit acidic). This is due to the presence of several particular isotopic ratios which suggest water-based chemistry took place at some point prior to the formation of the oldest rocks.
Of particular interest, Manfred Schidlowski argued in 1979 that the carbon isotopic ratios of some sedimentary rocks found in Greenland
were a relic of organic matter. There was much debate over the precise dating of the rocks, with Schidlowski suggesting they were about 3800 Ma old, and others suggesting a more "modest" 3600 Ma. In either case it was a very short time for abiogenesis
to have taken place, and if Schidlowski was correct, arguably too short a time. The Late Heavy Bombardment and the "re-melting" of the crust that it suggests provides a timeline under which this would be possible; life either formed immediately after the Late Heavy Bombardment, or more likely survived it, having arisen earlier during the Hadean. Recent studies suggest that the rocks Schidlowski found are indeed from the older end of the possible age range at about 3850 Ma, suggesting the latter possibility is the most likely answer. Schidlowski's argument remains a topic of heated debate.
More recently, a similar study of Jack Hills rocks shows traces of the same sort of potential organic indicators. Thorsten Geisler of the Institute for Mineralogy at the University of Münster
studied traces of carbon trapped in small pieces of diamond and graphite within zircons dating to 4250 Ma. The ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 was unusually high, normally a sign of "processing" by life.
Three-dimensional computer models developed in May 2009 by a team at the University of Colorado at Boulder
postulate that much of Earth's crust, and the microbes living in it, could have survived the Bombardment. Their models suggest that although the surface of the Earth would have been sterilized, hydrothermal vents below the Earth's surface could have incubated life by providing a sanctuary for heat-loving microbes
.
A series of simulations by Gomes et al. start with a Solar System
where the gas giant planets are in a tight orbital configuration. This configuration is in itself stable, but assuming a rich trans-Neptunian belt
, stray transneptunians interacted with these planets, causing them to migrate slowly during a time of several hundred million years. Jupiter is predicted to migrate inward, whereas the other planets go outwards. By this migration, the solar system became catastrophically unstable when Jupiter and Saturn reached a 2:1 orbital resonance, causing the outer solar system to reconfigure rapidly to a wide jovian system. As these planets migrated, resonances would be "swept" through the asteroid belt and Kuiper belt. These resonances would increase the orbital eccentricity
of the objects, allowing them to enter the inner solar system and impact with the terrestrial planets.
simulation of the establishment of the planetary system, the outermost planets Uranus and Neptune formed very slowly, over a period of several billion years. Harold Levison and his team have also suggested that the relatively low density of material in the outer Solar System during planet formation would have greatly slowed their accretion.
This "late appearance" of these planets has therefore been suggested as a different reason for the LHB. However, recent calculations of gas-flows combined with planetesimal runaway growth in the outer solar system imply that Jovian planets formed extremely rapidly, on the order of 10 my, which does not support this explanation for the LHB.
. The orbit of this planet was theorized to be nearly circular but meta-stable, and was disrupted at the time of LHB, becoming eccentric, starting to sling asteroids about to collide with the inner planets before ultimately plunging into the Sun.
as a result and receded further away from the Sun, preserving the relative orbital stability of the inner solar system
.
Moon
The Moon is Earth's only known natural satellite,There are a number of near-Earth asteroids including 3753 Cruithne that are co-orbital with Earth: their orbits bring them close to Earth for periods of time but then alter in the long term . These are quasi-satellites and not true moons. For more...
, and by inference on Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
, Mercury
Mercury (planet)
Mercury is the innermost and smallest planet in the Solar System, orbiting the Sun once every 87.969 Earth days. The orbit of Mercury has the highest eccentricity of all the Solar System planets, and it has the smallest axial tilt. It completes three rotations about its axis for every two orbits...
, Venus
Venus
Venus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. The planet is named after Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty. After the Moon, it is the brightest natural object in the night sky, reaching an apparent magnitude of −4.6, bright enough to cast shadows...
, and Mars
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
as well. The LHB is "late" only in relation to the main period of accretion
Accretion (astrophysics)
In astrophysics, the term accretion is used for at least two distinct processes.The first and most common is the growth of a massive object by gravitationally attracting more matter, typically gaseous matter in an accretion disc. Accretion discs are common around smaller stars or stellar remnants...
, when the Earth and the other three rocky planets first formed, and gained the majority of their material; in relation to Earth history as a whole it is still a fairly early phase. The evidence for this event comes primarily from the dating of lunar samples, which indicates that most impact melt rocks formed in this rather narrow interval of time. While many hypotheses have been put forth to explain a "spike" in the flux of either asteroidal or cometary materials to the inner solar system, no consensus yet exists as to its cause. The Nice model
Nice model
The Nice model is a scenario for the dynamical evolution of the Solar System. It is named for the location of the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, where it was initially developed, in Nice, France. It proposes the migration of the giant planets from an initial compact configuration into their...
popular among planetary scientists
Planetary science
Planetary science is the scientific study of planets , moons, and planetary systems, in particular those of the Solar System and the processes that form them. It studies objects ranging in size from micrometeoroids to gas giants, aiming to determine their composition, dynamics, formation,...
postulates that the gas giant
Gas giant
A gas giant is a large planet that is not primarily composed of rock or other solid matter. There are four gas giants in the Solar System: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune...
planets migrated in orbit at this time, causing objects in the asteroid belt
Asteroid belt
The asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets...
and/or Kuiper belt
Kuiper belt
The Kuiper belt , sometimes called the Edgeworth–Kuiper belt, is a region of the Solar System beyond the planets extending from the orbit of Neptune to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt, although it is far larger—20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive...
to be put onto eccentric orbits that reached the terrestrial planet
Terrestrial planet
A terrestrial planet, telluric planet or rocky planet is a planet that is composed primarily of silicate rocks or metals. Within the Solar System, the terrestrial planets are the inner planets closest to the Sun...
s. Nevertheless, some argue that the lunar sample data do not require a cataclysmic cratering event near 3.9 Ga, and that the apparent clustering of impact melt ages near this time is an artifact of sampling material affected by a single large impact basin.
Evidence for a cataclysm
The main piece of evidence for a lunar cataclysm comes from the radiometric agesRadiometric dating
Radiometric dating is a technique used to date materials such as rocks, usually based on a comparison between the observed abundance of a naturally occurring radioactive isotope and its decay products, using known decay rates...
of impact melt rocks that were collected during the Apollo missions. The majority of these impact melts are believed to have formed during the collision of asteroids or comets tens of kilometers across, forming impact craters hundreds of kilometers in diameter. The Apollo 15
Apollo 15
Apollo 15 was the ninth manned mission in the American Apollo space program, the fourth to land on the Moon and the eighth successful manned mission. It was the first of what were termed "J missions", long duration stays on the Moon with a greater focus on science than had been possible on previous...
, 16
Apollo 16
Young and Duke served as the backup crew for Apollo 13; Mattingly was slated to be the Apollo 13 command module pilot until being pulled from the mission due to his exposure to rubella through Duke.-Backup crew:...
, and 17
Apollo 17
Apollo 17 was the eleventh and final manned mission in the American Apollo space program. Launched at 12:33 a.m. EST on December 7, 1972, with a three-member crew consisting of Commander Eugene Cernan, Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans, and Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 remains the...
landing sites were chosen as a result of their proximity to the Imbrium
Mare Imbrium
Mare Imbrium, Latin for "Sea of Showers" or "Sea of Rains", is a vast lunar mare filling a basin on Earth's Moon and one of the larger craters in the Solar System. Mare Imbrium was created when lava flooded the giant crater formed when a very large object hit the Moon long ago...
, Nectaris
Mare Nectaris
The Sea of Nectar is a small lunar mare or sea located between the Sea of Tranquillity and the Sea of Fecundity . Montes Pyrenaeus borders the mare to the west and the large crater near the south center of the mare is known as Rosse...
, and Serenitatis
Mare Serenitatis
Mare Serenitatis is a lunar mare that sits just to the east of Mare Imbrium on the Moon.It is located within the Serenitatis basin, which is of the Nectarian epoch. The material surrounding the mare is of the Lower Imbrian epoch, while the mare material is of the Upper Imbrian epoch...
basins.
Under study on Earth, the ages of impact melts collected at these sites clustered between about 3.8 and 4.1 Ga. The apparent clustering of ages of these was first noticed in the mid-1970s by Fouad Tera, Dimitri Papanastassiou, and Gerald Wasserburg who postulated that the ages record an intense bombardment of the Moon. They called it the "lunar cataclysm" and proposed that it represented a dramatic increase in the rate of bombardment of the Moon around 3.9 Ga. If these impact melts were derived from these three basins, then not only did these three prominent impact basins form within a short interval of time, but so did many others based on stratigraphic
Stratigraphy
Stratigraphy, a branch of geology, studies rock layers and layering . It is primarily used in the study of sedimentary and layered volcanic rocks....
grounds. At the time, the conclusion was considered controversial.
As more data has become available, particularly from lunar meteorites, this theory, while still controversial, has gained in popularity. The lunar meteorites are believed to randomly sample the lunar surface, and at least some of these should have originated from regions far from the Apollo landing sites. Many of the feldspathic
Feldspar
Feldspars are a group of rock-forming tectosilicate minerals which make up as much as 60% of the Earth's crust....
lunar meteorites probably originated from the lunar far side, and impact melts within these have recently been dated. Consistent with the cataclysm hypothesis, none of their ages was found to be older than about 3.9 Ga. Nevertheless, the ages do not "cluster" at this date, but span between 2.5 and 3.9 Ga.
Studies of the highland crater size distributions suggest that the same family of projectiles struck Mercury and the Moon during late heavy bombardment. If the history of decay of late heavy bombardment on Mercury also followed the history of late heavy bombardment on the Moon, the youngest large basin discovered, Caloris
Caloris Basin
The Caloris Basin, also called Caloris Planitia, is a large impact crater on Mercury about in diameter, one of the largest impact basins in the solar system. Caloris is Latin for heat and the basin is so-named because the Sun is almost directly overhead every second time Mercury passes perihelion...
, is comparable in age to the youngest large lunar basins, Orientale and Imbrium, and all of the plains units are older than 3 billion years.
Criticisms of the cataclysm hypothesis
While the cataclysm hypothesis has recently gained in popularity, particularly among dynamicists who have identified possible causes for such a phenomenon, the cataclysm hypothesis is still a controversial theory that is based on debatable assumptions. Two criticisms are that (1) the "cluster" of impact ages could be an artifact of sampling a single basin's ejecta, and (2) that the lack of impact melt rocks older than about 4.1 Ga is related to all such samples having been pulverized, or their ages being reset.The first criticism concerns the origin of the impact melt rocks that were sampled at the Apollo landing sites. While these impact melts have been commonly attributed to having been derived from the closest basin, it has been argued that a large portion of these might instead be derived from the Imbrium basin. The Imbrium impact basin is the youngest and largest of the multi-ring basins found on the central nearside of the Moon, and quantitative modeling shows that significant amounts of ejecta from this event should be present at all of the Apollo landing sites. According to this alternative hypothesis, the cluster of impact melt ages near 3.9 Ga simply reflects material being collected from a single impact event, Imbrium, and not several.
A second criticism concerns the significance of the lack of impact melt rocks older than about 4.1 Ga. One hypothesis for this observation that does not involve a cataclysm is that old melt rocks did exist, but that their ages have all been reset by the continuous effects of impact cratering over the past 4 billion years. Furthermore, it is possible that these putative samples could all have been pulverized to such small sizes that it is impossible to obtain age determinations using standard radiometric methods.
Geological consequences on Earth
If a lunar cataclysmic cratering event were truly to have occurred on the Moon, the Earth would have been affected as well. Extrapolating lunar cratering rates to Earth at this time suggest that the following number of craters would have formed:- 22,000 or more impact craterImpact craterIn the broadest sense, the term impact crater can be applied to any depression, natural or manmade, resulting from the high velocity impact of a projectile with a larger body...
s with diameters >20 km (12.4 mi), - about 40 impact basins with diameters about 1000 km (621.4 mi),
- several impact basins with diameter about 5000 km (3,106.9 mi),
Serious environmental damage would occur about every 100 years, although life is not known to have existed on Earth at this time.
Prior to the introduction of the Late Heavy Bombardment theory, it was generally assumed that the Earth had remained molten until about 3.8 Ga. This date could be found in all of the oldest known rocks from around the world, and appeared to represent a strong "cutoff point" beyond which older rocks could not be found. These dates remained fairly constant even across various dating methods, including the system considered the most accurate and least affected by environment, uranium-lead dating
Uranium-lead dating
Uranium-lead is one of the oldest and most refined of the radiometric dating schemes, with a routine age range of about 1 million years to over 4.5 billion years, and with routine precisions in the 0.1-1 percent range...
of zircon
Zircon
Zircon is a mineral belonging to the group of nesosilicates. Its chemical name is zirconium silicate and its corresponding chemical formula is ZrSiO4. A common empirical formula showing some of the range of substitution in zircon is 1–x4x–y...
s. As no older rocks could be found, it was generally assumed that the Earth had remained molten until this point in time, which defined the boundary between the earlier Hadean
Hadean
The Hadean is the geologic eon before the Archean. It started with the formation of the Earth about 4.7 Ga and ended roughly 3.8 Ga, though the latter date varies according to different sources. The name "Hadean" derives from Hades, Greek for "Underworld", referring to the "hellish"...
and later Archean
Archean
The Archean , also spelled Archeozoic or Archæozoic) is a geologic eon before the Paleoproterozoic Era of the Proterozoic Eon, before 2.5 Ga ago. Instead of being based on stratigraphy, this date is defined chronometrically...
eons.
Older rocks could be found, however, in the form of chips off asteroid
Asteroid
Asteroids are a class of small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun. They have also been called planetoids, especially the larger ones...
s that fall to Earth as meteorites. Like the rocks on Earth, asteroids also show a strong cutoff point, at about 4.6 Ga, which is assumed to be the time when the first solids formed in the protoplanetary disk
Protoplanetary disk
A protoplanetary disk is a rotating circumstellar disk of dense gas surrounding a young newly formed star, a T Tauri star, or Herbig Ae/Be star...
around the then-young Sun. The Hadean, then, was the period of time between the formation of these early rocks in space, and the eventual solidification of the Earth's crust, some 700 million years later. This time would include the accretion of the planets from the disk and its slow cooling into a solid as the gravitational potential energy of this collapse was released.
Later calculations showed that the rate of collapse and cooling was dependent on the size of the body, and applying this to an Earth-sized mass suggested this should have happened quite quickly, as quickly as 100 million years. The difference between measurement and theory was something of a mystery at the time.
The Late Heavy Bombardment is now offered as an explanation of this oddity. Under this model, the rocks dating to 3.8 Ga represent those that were solidifying after much of the crust was destroyed by the Bombardment. The Acasta Gneiss
Acasta Gneiss
The Acasta Gneiss is a rock outcrop of Hadean tonalite gneiss in the Slave craton in Northwest Territories, Canada. Located on an island about 300 kilometres north of Yellowknife, the Acasta River rock deposit, believed to be 4.031 to 3.58 billion years old, is the oldest known intact crustal...
in the North American cratonic shield and gneisses within the Jack Hills
Jack Hills
The Jack Hills are a range of hills in Mid West Western Australia. They are best known as the source of the oldest material of terrestrial origin found to date: zircons that formed around 4.4 billion years ago...
portion of the Narryer Gneiss Terrane in Western Australia are, collectively, the oldest continental fragments on Earth and do not predate the late heavy bombardment. The oldest mineral yet dated on Earth, a zircon from Jack Hills, predates this event but may simply be a fragment of crust left over from this event, contained within a much younger (~3800 Ma old) rock. Some geologists believe they have found 4.28 billion year old rock in Quebec, Canada, though.
This has led to something of a revolution in the understanding of the earliest stages of Earth's history during the Hadean. Older references generally show the Hadean Earth having a molten surface with prominent volcano
Volcano
2. Bedrock3. Conduit 4. Base5. Sill6. Dike7. Layers of ash emitted by the volcano8. Flank| 9. Layers of lava emitted by the volcano10. Throat11. Parasitic cone12. Lava flow13. Vent14. Crater15...
s, for instance Hadean time. The name referred to the "hellish" conditions assumed on Earth for the time. It is now believed that the Hadean surface was solid, temperate, and water covered (albeit acidic). This is due to the presence of several particular isotopic ratios which suggest water-based chemistry took place at some point prior to the formation of the oldest rocks.
Of particular interest, Manfred Schidlowski argued in 1979 that the carbon isotopic ratios of some sedimentary rocks found in Greenland
Greenland
Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Though physiographically a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with Europe for...
were a relic of organic matter. There was much debate over the precise dating of the rocks, with Schidlowski suggesting they were about 3800 Ma old, and others suggesting a more "modest" 3600 Ma. In either case it was a very short time for abiogenesis
Abiogenesis
Abiogenesis or biopoesis is the study of how biological life arises from inorganic matter through natural processes, and the method by which life on Earth arose...
to have taken place, and if Schidlowski was correct, arguably too short a time. The Late Heavy Bombardment and the "re-melting" of the crust that it suggests provides a timeline under which this would be possible; life either formed immediately after the Late Heavy Bombardment, or more likely survived it, having arisen earlier during the Hadean. Recent studies suggest that the rocks Schidlowski found are indeed from the older end of the possible age range at about 3850 Ma, suggesting the latter possibility is the most likely answer. Schidlowski's argument remains a topic of heated debate.
More recently, a similar study of Jack Hills rocks shows traces of the same sort of potential organic indicators. Thorsten Geisler of the Institute for Mineralogy at the University of Münster
University of Münster
The University of Münster is a public university located in the city of Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. The WWU is part of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, a society of Germany's leading research universities...
studied traces of carbon trapped in small pieces of diamond and graphite within zircons dating to 4250 Ma. The ratio of carbon-12 to carbon-13 was unusually high, normally a sign of "processing" by life.
Three-dimensional computer models developed in May 2009 by a team at the University of Colorado at Boulder
University of Colorado at Boulder
The University of Colorado Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado...
postulate that much of Earth's crust, and the microbes living in it, could have survived the Bombardment. Their models suggest that although the surface of the Earth would have been sterilized, hydrothermal vents below the Earth's surface could have incubated life by providing a sanctuary for heat-loving microbes
Thermophile
A thermophile is an organism — a type of extremophile — that thrives at relatively high temperatures, between 45 and 122 °C . Many thermophiles are archaea...
.
Gas giant migration
Solar System
The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...
where the gas giant planets are in a tight orbital configuration. This configuration is in itself stable, but assuming a rich trans-Neptunian belt
Trans-Neptunian object
A trans-Neptunian object is any minor planet in the Solar System that orbits the Sun at a greater distance on average than Neptune.The first trans-Neptunian object to be discovered was Pluto in 1930...
, stray transneptunians interacted with these planets, causing them to migrate slowly during a time of several hundred million years. Jupiter is predicted to migrate inward, whereas the other planets go outwards. By this migration, the solar system became catastrophically unstable when Jupiter and Saturn reached a 2:1 orbital resonance, causing the outer solar system to reconfigure rapidly to a wide jovian system. As these planets migrated, resonances would be "swept" through the asteroid belt and Kuiper belt. These resonances would increase the orbital eccentricity
Orbital eccentricity
The orbital eccentricity of an astronomical body is the amount by which its orbit deviates from a perfect circle, where 0 is perfectly circular, and 1.0 is a parabola, and no longer a closed orbit...
of the objects, allowing them to enter the inner solar system and impact with the terrestrial planets.
Late Uranus/Neptune formation
According to one planetesimalPlanetesimal
Planetesimals are solid objects thought to exist in protoplanetary disks and in debris disks.A widely accepted theory of planet formation, the so-called planetesimal hypothesis of Viktor Safronov, states that planets form out of cosmic dust grains that collide and stick to form larger and larger...
simulation of the establishment of the planetary system, the outermost planets Uranus and Neptune formed very slowly, over a period of several billion years. Harold Levison and his team have also suggested that the relatively low density of material in the outer Solar System during planet formation would have greatly slowed their accretion.
This "late appearance" of these planets has therefore been suggested as a different reason for the LHB. However, recent calculations of gas-flows combined with planetesimal runaway growth in the outer solar system imply that Jovian planets formed extremely rapidly, on the order of 10 my, which does not support this explanation for the LHB.
Planet V theory
One such mechanism is presented by the Planet V simulations, that posits the former existence of a fifth planet, smaller than Mars, in the inner solar system, outside the orbit of Mars but inside the asteroid beltAsteroid belt
The asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets...
. The orbit of this planet was theorized to be nearly circular but meta-stable, and was disrupted at the time of LHB, becoming eccentric, starting to sling asteroids about to collide with the inner planets before ultimately plunging into the Sun.
Fifth gas giant hypothesis
Another hypothesis has posited an additional fifth gas giant in a trans-Saturnian orbit between Saturn and Uranus. The mooted ice giant is theorised to have been flung out of our solar system after a close encounter with Jupiter, which lost angular momentumAngular momentum
In physics, angular momentum, moment of momentum, or rotational momentum is a conserved vector quantity that can be used to describe the overall state of a physical system...
as a result and receded further away from the Sun, preserving the relative orbital stability of the inner solar system
An Exo-System With a Possible Late Heavy Bombardment
Evidence has been found for Late Heavy Bombardment-like conditions around the star Eta CorviEta Corvi
Eta Corvi is an F-type main sequence star, the sixth-brightest star in the constellation of Corvus. Two debris disks have been detected orbiting this star, one warm within a few AU and another out at ~150 AU.-Properties:This star is about 40% more massive than the Sun but is only about 30% of...
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See also
- Cool Early EarthCool Early EarthThe Cool Early Earth theory posits that the early planet Earth had a calm influx of bolides and a cool climate allowing fluid water, after the planetary accretion but before the occurrence of the Late Heavy Bombardment in the Hadean geological eon. The Cool Early Earth is believed to have been the...
- Formation and evolution of the Solar SystemFormation and evolution of the Solar SystemThe formation and evolution of the Solar System is estimated to have begun 4.568 billion years ago with the gravitational collapse of a small part of a giant molecular cloud...
External links
- Ker Than, "New Insight into Earth’s Early Bombardment" - Space.com, April 17, 2006.
- Late Heavy Bombardment was asteroidal, not cometary, The Geological Society, March 4, 2002.
- Robert Roy Britt, "Evidence for Ancient Bombardment of Earth," - Space.com, July 24, 2002.