The Compositional Structure of the Asteroid Belt
By F. DeMeo, C. Alexander, Kevin J. Walsh, Clark R. Chapman, R. Binzel. 2015
158 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The past decade has brought major improvements in large-scale asteroid discovery and characterization with over half a million known asteroids and over 100,000 with some measurement of physical characterization. This explosion of data has allowed us to create a new global picture of the Main Asteroid Belt. Put in context with meteorite measurements and dynamical models, a new and more complete picture of Solar System evolution has emerged. The question has changed from "What was the original compositional gradient of the Asteroid Belt?" to "What was the original compositional gradient of small bodies across the entire Solar System?" No longer is the leading theory that two belts of planetesimals are primordial, but instead those belts were formed and sculpted through evolutionary processes after Solar System formation. This article reviews the advancements on the fronts of asteroid compositional characterization, meteorite measurements, and dynamical theories in the context of the heliocentric distribution of asteroid compositions seen in the Main Belt today. This chapter also reviews the major outstanding questions relating to asteroid compositions and distributions and summarizes the progress and current state of understanding of these questions to form the big picture of the formation and evolution of asteroids in the Main Belt. Finally, we briefly review the relevance of asteroids and their compositions in their greater context within our Solar System and beyond.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Paleontology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8714414922530ddfae84b218a23182276eb4494b
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Rubble Pile Asteroids (2018, background): “…somewhat regularly (on Solar System timescales), and this is seemingly confirmed by the known suite of collisionally-formed asteroid families and the highly brecciated properties of many different types of meteorites (Bottke et al. 2005, 2015, Nesvorny et al 2015, DeMeo et al. 2015, Housen et al.”
- The taxonomic distribution of asteroids from multi-filter all-sky photometric surveys (2013, methodology): “In previous work (e.g., Kiang, 1971; Chapman et al., 1971, 1975; Gradie and Tedesco, 1982; Zellner et al., 1985; Bus, 1999; Bus and Binzel, 2002b; Mothé-Diniz et al., 2003) the asteroid belt is broken up into bins based on orbital elements (typically semi-major axis but some works include inclinatio”
- Origin of water in the inner Solar System: Planetesimals scattered inward during Jupiter and Saturn's rapid gas accretion (2017, background): “a variety of other classes but predominantly C-types (Gradie and Tedesco, 1982; Bus and Binzel, 2002; DeMeo and Carry, 2013, 2014; DeMeo et al., 2015).”
- Water delivery and giant impacts in the 'Grand Tack' scenario (2014, unknown): “…this assumption is the distribution of those bodies in the asteroid belt today and the dichotomy in their physical properties, where water-poor asteroids predominate in the inner region and water-rich bodies are more abundant in the outer region (Gradie and Tedesco, 1982; Mothé-Diniz et al., 2003).”