Building Earth with pebbles made of chondritic components

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that Earth's major element composition can be modeled by a mixture of chondritic components, supporting pebble accretion as a viable mechanism for Earth's formation within the solar nebula's lifetime.

Contribution

It identifies a specific mixture of chondritic components, including a high proportion of refractory inclusions, that matches Earth's composition better than previous models.

Findings

Chondritic mixture matches Earth's Fe, Ni, Si, Mg, Ca, Al, O within uncertainties.

Best fit mixture is predominantly carbonaceous, not enstatite chondrules.

Pebble accretion can build Earth-like mass within a few million years.

Abstract

Pebble accretion provides new insights into Earth's building blocks and early protoplanetary disk conditions. Here, we show that mixtures of chondritic components: metal grains, chondrules, calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs), and amoeboid olivine aggregates (AOAs) match Earth's major element composition (Fe, Ni, Si, Mg, Ca, Al, O) within uncertainties, whereas no combination of chondrites and iron meteorites does. Our best fits also match the $\epsilon^{54}$Cr and $\epsilon^{50}$Ti values of Earth precisely, whereas the best fits for chondrites, or components with a high proportion of E chondrules, fail to match Earth. In contrast to some previous studies, our best-fitting component mixture is predominantly carbonaceous, rather than enstatite chondrules. It also includes 15 wt% of early-formed refractory inclusions (CAIs + AOAs), which is similar to that found in some C chondrites (CO, CV, CK), but notably higher than NC chondrites. High abundances of refractory materials are lacking in NC chondrites, because they formed after the majority of refractory grains were either drawn into the Sun or incorporated into terrestrial protoplanets via pebble accretion. We show that combinations of Stokes numbers of chondritic components build 0.35-0.7 Earth masses in 2 My in the Hill regime accretion, for a typical pebble column density of 1.2 kg/m2 at 1 au. However, a larger or smaller column density leads to super-Earth or moon-mass bodies, respectively. Our calculations also demonstrate that a few My of pebble accretion with these components yields a total protoplanet mass inside 1 au exceeding the combined masses of Earth, Moon, Venus, and Mercury. Accordingly, we conclude that pebble accretion is a viable mechanism to build Earth and its major element composition from primitive chondritic components within the solar nebula lifetime.