The link between Athor and EL meteorites does not constrain the timing of the giant planet instabilityOPEN ACCESS
Andre Izidoro, Rogerio Deienno, Sean N. Raymond, Matthew S. Clement
Comments welcome
“The asteroid Athor, residing today in the inner main asteroid belt, has been recently associated as the source of EL enstatite meteorites to Earth. It has been argued that Athor formed in the terrestrial region — as indicated by similarity in isotopic compositions between Earth and EL meteorites — and was implanted in the belt ≳60 Myr after the formation of the solar system. A recently published study modelling Athor’s implantation in the belt (Avdellidou et al 2024) further concluded, using an idealized set of numerical simulations, that Athor cannot have been scattered from the terrestrial region and implanted at its current location unless the giant planet dynamical instability occurred after Athor’s implantation (≳ 60 Myr). In this work, we revisit this problem with a comprehensive suite of dynamical simulations of the implantation of asteroids into the belt during the terrestrial planet accretion. We find that Athor-like objects can in fact be implanted into the belt long after the giant planets’ dynamical instability. The probability of implanting Athor analogs when the instability occurs at ≲ 15 Myr is at most a factor of ∼ 2 lower than that of an instability occurring at ∼ 100 Myr after the solar system formation. Moreover, Athor’s implantation can occur up to ≳ 100 Myr after the giant planet instability. We conclude that Athor’s link to EL meteorites does not constrain the timing of the solar system’s dynamical instability.”
EL meteorites do date the giant planet instability
Chrysa Avdellidou, Marco Delbo, David Nesvorny, Kevin J. Walsh, Alessandro Morbidelli
comment on The link between Athor and EL meteorites does not constrain the timing of the giant planet instability, Andre Izidoro, Rogerio Deienno, Sean N. Raymond, Matthew S. Clement
“In our recent work, we combined dynamical simulations, meteoritic data and thermal models as well as asteroid observations to argue that the current parent body of the EL meteorites was implanted into the asteroid belt not earlier than 60 Myr after the beginning of the Solar System and that the most likely capture mechanism was the giant planet orbital instability. In the study “The link between Athor and EL meteorites does not constrain the timing of the giant planet instability” that appeared in arXiv, Izidoro and collaborators argue that the implantation of Athor into the asteroid belt does not necessarily require that the giant planet orbital instability occurred at the implantation time. Here we provide further arguments that, in the end, the giant planet instability is still the most likely dynamical process to implant asteroid Athor into the asteroid main belt between 60 and 100 Myr after the beginning of the Solar System.”
