The pockmarked asteroid Vesta (pictured) has provided more hints about the history of the early Solar System.
As giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn shifted into place about 4.1 billion years ago, their changing gravitational pull flung asteroid fragments into highly eccentric orbits. Those space rocks, in turn, slammed into other asteroids at high speed, heating them and altering their chemistry.
This scenario, proposed by Simone Marchi at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and his colleagues, could explain why the asteroid Vesta was pummelled so frequently between 4.1 billion and 3.4 billion years ago. The team's simulations suggest that meteors were slung at much higher velocities than once thought, for a period that lasted hundreds of millions of years.
Nature Geosci. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1769 (2013)
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Migrating planets sped up collisions. Nature 495, 413 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/495413d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/495413d
