GRAIN SORTING IN COMETARY DUST FROM THE OUTER SOLAR NEBULA

Abstract

Most young stars are surrounded by a disk of gas and dust. Close to the hot stars, amorphous dust grains from the parent molecular cloud are reprocessed into crystals that are then distributed throughout the accretion disk. In some disks, there is a reduction in crystalline grain size with heliocentric distance from the star. We investigated crystalline grain size distributions in chondritic porous (CP) interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) believed to be from small, icy bodies that accreted in outer regions of the solar nebula. The grains are Mg-rich silicates and Fe-rich sulfides, the two most abundant minerals in CP IDPs. We find that they are predominantly <0.25 {mu}m in radius with a mean grain size that varies from one CP IDP to another. We report a size-density relationship between the silicates and sulfides. A similar size-density relationship between much larger silicate and sulfide grains in meteorites from the asteroid belt is ascribed to aerodynamic sorting. Since the silicate and sulfide grains in CP IDPs are theoretically too small for aerodynamic sorting, their size-density relationship may be due to another process capable of sorting small grains.