Related papers: Large Impacts onto the Early Earth: Planetary Ster…
Impacts may have had a significant effect on the atmospheric chemistry of the early Earth. Reduced phases in the impactor (e.g., metallic iron) can reduce the planet's H$_2$O inventory to produce massive atmospheres rich in H$_2$. Whilst…
Immediately after their formation, the terrestrial planets experienced intense impact bombardment by comets, leftover planetesimals from primary accretion, and asteroids. This temporal interval in solar system evolution, termed late…
The origin of life on Earth would benefit from a prebiotic atmosphere that produced nitriles, like HCN, which enable ribonucleotide synthesis. However, geochemical evidence suggests that Hadean air was relatively oxidizing with negligible…
Late accretion is a process that strongly modulated surface geomorphic and geochemical features of Mercury. Yet, the fate of the impactors and their effects on Mercury's surface through the bombardment epoch are not clear. Using Monte-Carlo…
The Hadean, once thought to be uninhabitable and tumultuous, has more recently been recontextualized as a clement time in which oceans, land, and life likely appeared on Earth. This non-exhaustive chapter follows multiple threads from…
Giant impacts, the collisions between planetary embryos, play a crucial role in sculpting the planets and their orbital architectures. Numerical simulations have advanced our understanding of these events, enabling estimations of mass and…
The origin of life on Earth seems to demand a highly reduced early atmosphere, rich in CH4, H2, and NH3, but geological evidence suggests that Earth's mantle has always been relatively oxidized and its emissions dominated by CO2 H2O, and…
In the aftermath of the Moon-forming giant impact, the Hadean Earth's mantle and surface crystallized from a global magma ocean blanketed by a dense volatile-rich atmosphere. While prior studies have explored the thermal evolution of such…
Impactors have hit the Earth since its formation and have continued to be infrequent guests throughout the Earth's history. Although the early part of the Earth's history was marked by these violent events, life was present early, possibly…
We perform a suite of smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations to investigate in detail the results of a giant impact on the young Uranus. We study the internal structure, rotation rate, and atmospheric retention of the post-impact…
The excess abundance of highly siderophile elements (HSEs), as inferred for the terrestrial planets and the Moon, is thought to record a `late veneer' of impacts after the giant impact phase of planet formation. Estimates for total mass…
Impact rates in the first 500 Myr of the solar system are critical to an understanding of lunar geological history, but they have been controversial. The widely accepted, post-Apollo paradigm of early lunar impact cratering (ca. 1975-2014)…
Large impacts onto young rocky planets may transform their compositions, creating highly reducing conditions at their surfaces and reintroducing highly siderophile metals to their mantles. Key to these processes is the availability of an…
Recent advances in our understanding of the dynamical history of the Solar system have altered the inferred bombardment history of the Earth during accretion of the Late Veneer, after the Moon-forming impact. We investigate how the…
In order to test planetary accretion and differentiation scenarios, we integrated a multistage core-mantle differentiation model with N-body accretion simulations. Impacts between embryos and planetesimals result in magma ocean formation…
The abundance of highly siderophile elements (HSEs) inferred for Mars' mantle from martian meteorites implies a Late Veneer (LV) mass addition of ~0.8 wt% with broadly chondritic composition. Late accretion to Mars by a differentiated…
The Earth was born in violence. Many giant collisions of protoplanets are thought to have occurred during the terrestrial planet formation. Here we investigated the giant impact stage by using a hybrid code that consistently deals with the…
The presence of highly siderophile elements in Earth's mantle indicates that a small percentage of Earth's mass was delivered after the last giant impact in a stage of 'late accretion.' There is ongoing debate about the nature of…
Given their tendency to be incorporated into the core during differentiation, the highly-siderophile elements (HSEs) in Earth's mantle are thought to have been accreted as a `late veneer' after the end of the giant impact phase. Bottke et…
Because of the high energies involved, giant impacts that occur during planetary accretion cause large degrees of melting. The depth of melting in the target body after each collision determines the pressure and temperature conditions of…