Vaporizing Planets and Raining Iron

In this presentation Dr. Krauss will discuss his team's recent discoveries about processes occurring during Earth's formation, which was presented in their Nature Geoscience article Impact Vaporization of Planetesimal Cores in the Late Stages of Planet Formation. He will begin by presenting a bit of background for how planets form. Then he will discuss the importance of understanding high velocity impact events, as they played a tremendous role in shaping the solar system that we see today. However, the understanding of these impact events is based upon the intuition gained from running computer simulations of these high velocity collisions (as they are far too energetic to simulate in the lab). To better understand these impact events, we need better models for how materials behave at these extreme conditions, in particular for materials like iron. At the Sandia Z machine, his team developed an experimetnal technique to understand the process of impact induced vaporization, and they used it to determine the critical impact speed to vaporize iron cores (it's lower than one would have thought). Finally, he will discuss how this improved understanding of the physics of impacts, has important implications for understanding the timing of Earth's formation and the evolution of our solar system.

Dr. Richard Krauss is a Research Scientist with the HED-Shock Physics Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.