Abstract
AbstractMeteorites from interplanetary space often include high-pressure polymorphs of their constituent minerals, which provide records of past hypervelocity collisions. These collisions were expected to occur between kilometre-sized asteroids, generating transient high-pressure states lasting for several seconds to facilitate mineral transformations across the relevant phase boundaries. However, their mechanisms in such a short timescale were never experimentally evaluated and remained speculative. Here, we show a nanosecond transformation mechanism yielding ringwoodite, which is the most typical high-pressure mineral in meteorites. An olivine crystal was shock-compressed by a focused high-power laser pulse, and the transformation was time-resolved by femtosecond diffractometry using an X-ray free electron laser. Our results show the formation of ringwoodite through a faster, diffusionless process, suggesting that ringwoodite can form from collisions between much smaller bodies, such as metre to submetre-sized asteroids, at common relative velocities. Even nominally unshocked meteorites could therefore contain signatures of high-pressure states from past collisions.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
General Physics and Astronomy,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Chemistry
Reference58 articles.
1. Brearley, A. J. & Jones, R. H. Chondritic meteorites in Planetary Materials (Papike, J. J. ed.) 3-001-3-398 (Mineralogical Society of America, Chantilly, VA, 1998).
2. Messenger, S. et al. Samples of stars beyond the solar system: silicate grains in interplanetary dust. Science 300, 105–108 (2003).
3. Nakamura, T. et al. Itokawa dust particles: a direct link between S-type asteroids and ordinary chondrites. Science 333, 1113–1116 (2011).
4. Tsuchiyama, A. et al. Three-dimensional structure of Hayabusa samples: origin and evolution of Itokawa regolith. Science 333, 1125–1128 (2011).
5. Ringwood, A. E. Composition and Petrology of the Earth’s Mantle (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1975).
Cited by
15 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献，注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献，订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献