Formation of the Earth and Moon: Influence of Small Bodies

TL;DR

This paper models early Earth-Moon bombardment by small bodies, showing significant ice delivery and collision dynamics that shaped planetary formation and surface conditions over millions to billions of years.

Contribution

It presents a detailed model of small body impacts on Earth and Moon, quantifying collision timings, velocities, and source regions, highlighting the role of outer solar system objects.

Findings

Ice mass delivered could match Earth's oceans.

Most collisions from inner zones occurred within 10 million years.

Collision velocities ranged from 8 to 23 km/s.

Abstract

The paper discusses a model of the bombardment of the Earth and the Moon by small bodies when these planets were formed. It is shown that the total ice mass delivered with the bodies to the Earth from the feeding zone of the giant planets and the outer asteroid belt could have been comparable to the total mass of the Earth's oceans. Objects that initially crossed Jupiter's orbit could become Earth-crossers mainly within the first one million years. Most collisions of bodies originally located at a distance of 4 to 5 AU (astronomical units) from the Sun with the Earth occurred during the first ten million years. Some bodies from the Uranus and Neptune zones could fall onto the Earth in more than 20 million years. From their initial distances from the Sun of about 3 to 3.5 AU, some bodies could fall onto the Earth and Moon in a few billion years for the model that takes into account only the gravitational influence of the planets. The ratio of the number of bodies that collided with the Earth to the number of bodies that collided with the Moon varied mainly from 20 to 40 for planetesimals from the feeding zone of the terrestrial planets. For bodies originally located at a distance of more than 3 AU from the Sun, this ratio was mainly in the range between 16.4 and 17.4. The characteristic velocities of collisions of planetesimals from the feeding zones of the terrestrial planets with the Moon varied from 8 to 16 km/s, depending on the initial values of the semi-major axes and eccentricities of orbits of the planetesimals. The collision velocities of bodies that came from the feeding zones of Jupiter and Saturn with the Moon were mainly from 20 to 23 km/s.