Asteroids number in the millions and range from 930 km across to less than a few metres. They are classified according to their mineral content, which, in the case of the bigger ones, can be detected by means of their spectra. There are three main classes. C-type asteroids (‘c’ for carbon) comprise about 75% of the total, have very dark surfaces and are similar in composition to carbonaceous chondrites, the most common class of meteorite. S-types (‘s’ for stone) comprise about 15%, contain various silicate compounds and a certain amount of nickel and/or iron and may be the source of ordinary chondrites. The remaining 10% is made up mostly of M-types (‘m’ for metal), having spectra that suggest a predominantly iron content. They are therefore likely to be the source of most iron meteorites, though some M-types have too low a density to be consistent with this interpretation.

Within the various types, some asteroids can also be grouped into families, each representing a body that broke up into multitudinous smaller pieces. For example, the Flora family, the biggest such group, comprises over 800 asteroids of type S, arising from the break-up of an asteroid around 200 km across. There are around 64 known families in the asteroid belt and this number constrains estimates of its mass prior to the point when fragmentation began to outpace accretion. The asteroid belt 4.5 billion years ago may not have been more than 2 times the present mass, with about 50% of the family-forming collisions occurring within the first 500 million years (Marzari et al 1999).

Vesta, 530 km in diameter, is a rare example of a large, close-to-original parent body. It is thought to have spawned the V-type asteroids and the ‘HED’ group of achrondritic meteorites, most if not all of which would have derived from two enormous impact craters, 500 and 400 km wide and some 13 km deep, near its south pole. Vesta was large enough to have differentiated into a mantle and core, as internal melting caused light minerals (silicates) to float towards the surface and heavy minerals (primarily iron) to sink towards the centre. The source of the heat is uncertain, for although the asteroid formed very early, only 2-4 million years after CAIs, the heat generated by radioactivity seems to have been insufficient to cause large-scale melting (Kunihiro et al 2004, Sokol et al 2007). Possibly Vesta derived from the explosion of a still larger molten body and was already molten when it formed.

Whatever its origin, Vesta is exceptional. It is the second largest asteroid in the main belt and the only one known to have differentiated. Iron meteorites and M-type asteroids show that there once existed other such bodies – large enough to have differentiated to the point of producing a metal core – but the majority of asteroids are the result of disaggregation rather than aggregation, small chips off larger bodies that have long since perished. Although some, such as Itokawa, a C-type asteroid, are loosely bound ‘rubble piles’, they grew from the dust and boulders produced by the break-up of older, more coherent bodies; they are not first-generation asteroids and they are not on the way to becoming monolithic planetesimals. Itokawa’s porosity is 40%. Repeated impacts have failed to tamp it down into anything more solid.

Meteorites are asteroid fragments that land on Earth. They are divided into two main categories: those that underwent heating but not melting (chondrites) and those that experienced heating, melting and differentiation (achondrites such as the HED family, stony-irons and irons). Possibly the immediate forbears of the chondrites are aggregations of fine material (condensates, melt droplets, lithic fragments and ash) that issued from the exploded planets. The immediate forbears of the achondrites – Vesta being the only known extant example of such a forbear – were coherent masses of expelled molten material. The heterogeneity of Vesta’s bulk composition indicates that the planet from which it originated had not differentiated, or at least had not fully done so. It appears somewhat younger than most chondrites because it did not reach a solid state until somewhat later.

Assuming that all terrestrial planets started out with the same composition, metal cores should comprise around 15% of their volume, with the other 85% consisting of olivine-rich mantle and thin plagioclase-rich crust. In principle, therefore, asteroids of mantle silicate composition should be 5-6 times more plentiful than those composed of iron. They are, however, ‘astonishingly rare’ (Haack & McCoy 2005). The problem posed by the scarcity of olivine-rich asteroids compared to the abundance of asteroidal cores sampled by iron meteorites even has a name: ‘the great dunite shortage’ (dunite being rock composed of olivine).

The exploded planet hypothesis provides a solution: the parent bodies derived from the cores of the exploded planet or planets, not from the cores of smaller, now vanished, Vesta-like bodies. These parent asteroids were molten globes of metal. They were of the same generation as Vesta, but derived from the core of the former planet.

The iron content of chondrites varies enormously, depending on type. By far the most common group (over 90%) are the ordinary chondrites, which contain abundant chondrules, relatively sparse matrix, few refractory inclusions and 1.5-8 % iron. Relative to the bulk composition of the Earth, most classes of chondrite are therefore depleted in iron. By themselves, chondrites do not provide the recipe for a complete planet. Iron needs to be added, the full recipe being: chondrites (comprising CAIs, chondrules and matrix) + iron meteorites. The problem posed by the shortage of olivine-rich asteroids is solved by recognising that olivine and other such silicates are the main ingredients of chondrules. Chondrules make up the bulk of the meteoritic material that falls on Earth, and it is these that represent the primitive, partly differentiated mantle of the former planets. Recent work has confirmed that the olivine grains within chondrules derive from mantle material (Libourel & Krot 2007). In terms of the nebula hypothesis: ‘Chondrules are not as pristine as conventionally viewed; instead, they consist of nebular and asteroidal materials and must have postdated accretion, thermal metamorphism and differentiation of some early generation planetesimals.’

Two further predictions arise from this scenario. One is that if some or most iron meteorites are to be associated with CAIs and chondrules rather than with the Vesta generation, they should be approximately the same age as them (within the margins of differing crystallisation rates, for it is crystallisation that is being dated). It turns out that they are. Tungsten isotope data show that metal-silicate differentiation in the parent or parents of magmatic iron meteorites occurred ‘extremely early’, coeval with the first chondrules (Schersten et al 2006, Qin et al 2008). ‘Chondrites do not represent the precursor material from which asteroids accreted and then differentiated’ (Kleine et al 2005). Instead they ‘derive from asteroids that accreted late … [possibly] by re-accretion of debris produced during collisional disruption of older asteroids’.

The other prediction concerns the size and nature of the bodies from which the iron meteorites derived: the meteorites should have come from predominantly metallic parent bodies rather than ones that, following differentiation, had a large mantle round their cores. Again, this turns out to be so. We can distinguish between the two kinds of iron meteorite parent body by reference to their inferred cooling rates, and these are incompatible with cooling in a core insulated by a thick mantle (Yang et al 2008). The parents must have been ‘much larger than previously inferred and cooled with little or no mantle’ (Yang et al 2007). Protoplanets the size of the Moon or larger were stripped of their mantle, and not by some gradual chipping-away process but in a catastrophic event that destroyed the bodies.

If the initial mass [of the asteroid belt] was ~10³ times higher and many Moon-sized or larger protoplanets were present, collision rates would have been greatly enhanced while the differentiated bodies were still hot. As mantles are not efficiently stripped from cores by catastrophic impacts between asteroid-sized bodies, the IVA metallic body may have formed as a result of a grazing collision between protoplanets that disrupted the core of a Moon-sized body creating a string of metal-rich bodies.

The scenario of collisions leaving strings of metal-rich bodies is as elaborated by Asphaug et al, quoted at the beginning of this series. Colliding protoplanets do not, as is commonly assumed, simply merge. In some cases the result can be explosive, especially for the smaller body. As one author put it in their press release:

“As two massive objects pass near each other, gravitational forces induce dramatic physical changes – decompressing, melting, stripping material away, and even annih¬ilating the smaller object” Williams says. “You can do a lot of physics and chemistry on objects in the Solar System without even touching them.”

A planet exerts enormous pressure on itself through self-gravity, but the gravitational pull of a larger object passing close by can cause that pressure to drop precipitously. The effects of this depressurization can be explosive, Williams says.

“It’s like uncorking the world’s most carbonated beverage” he says. “What happens when a planet gets decompressed by 50% is something we don’t understand very well at this stage, but it can shift the chemistry and physics all over the place, producing a complexity of materials that could very well account for the heterogeneity we see in meteorites.”

Once regarded as the stuff of fringe speculation, exploding planets (envisaged in this view as exploding as a result of collisions) have now entered the mainstream.