Experiments quantifying elemental and isotopic fractionations during evaporation of CAI-like melts in low-pressure hydrogen and in vacuum: Constraints on thermal processing of CAIs in the protoplanetary disk
Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta(2021)
摘要
It is widely believed that the precursors of coarse-grained CAIs in chondrites are solar nebula condensates that were later reheated and melted to a high degree. Such melting under low-pressure conditions is expected to result in evaporation of moderately volatile magnesium and silicon and their mass-dependent isotopic fractionation. The evaporation of silicate melts has been extensively studied in vacuum laboratory experiments and a large experimental database on chemical and isotopic fractionations now exists. Nevertheless, it remains unclear if vacuum evaporation of CAI-like melts adequately describes the evaporation in the hydrogen-rich gas of the solar nebula. Here we report the results of a detailed experimental study on evaporation of a such melt at 1600 °C in both vacuum and low-pressure hydrogen gas, using 1.5- and 2.5-mm diameter samples. The experiments show that although at 2 × 10−4 bar H2 magnesium and silicon evaporate ∼2.8 times faster than at 2 × 10−5 bar H2 and ∼45 times faster than in vacuum, their relative evaporation rates and isotopic fractionation factors remain the same. This means that the chemical and isotopic evolutions of all evaporation residues plot along a single evaporation trajectory regardless of experimental conditions (vacuum or low-PH2) and sample size. The independence of chemical and isotopic evaporation trajectories on PH2 of the surrounding gas imply that the existing extensive experimental database on vacuum evaporation of CAI-like materials can be safely used to model the evaporation under solar nebula conditions, taking into account the dependence of evaporation kinetics on PH2.
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关键词
CAI evaporation,Experiments,Kinetics,Elemental fractionation,Isotopic fractionation,Magnesium,Silicon,Timescales,Astrophysical models,Nebular shock
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