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Paper

TESTING March 10, 2026

Shaken, not stirred: inefficient mixing of CM- and CI-like materials

Authors

Sarah E. Anderson, Pierre Vernazza, Miroslav Broz

Abstract

A recent study suggests that CM chondrite-like planetesimals formed in the vicinity of Saturn, in a pressure bump outside the gap carved by proto-Jupiter. While a fraction of these objects was implanted into the asteroid belt as a consequence of Saturn's growth, it remains unclear whether the scattered remainder could reach the ice-giant region and mix with more distant carbonaceous reservoirs. We test whether outward scattering during Saturn's growth and migration can implant CM-like bodies onto long-lived orbits in the Uranus-Neptune region, where they could contaminate the CI reservoir. We performed N-body integrations of 100 km planetesimals launched from the outer edge of Jupiter's gap, including gas drag and the gravitational perturbations of growing Jupiter and Saturn, with optional inclusion of a nearby ice-giant embryo. We explored a range of gas surface-density profiles and growth timescales. While Saturn's growth efficiently scatters CM-like planetesimals, fewer than about 2 percent are implanted beyond 15 au, even under gas-rich conditions, because gas drag damps their eccentricities and drives them back toward their perihelia rather than allowing them to circularize at larger distances. Adding an ice-giant core modestly increases the outward reach (up to about 4 percent in the most gas-rich case), but Type-I migration further lowers perihelia, making long-term retention at large distances difficult. For a CM mass budget M_CM,tot about 1 M_Earth, this implies at most M_CM < 0.02-0.04 M_Earth reaches 15-25 au, corresponding to a diluted mass fraction < (1-2) x 10^-3 in the outer ring, hence negligible contamination of the CI reservoir. Combined with the distinct radial distributions of CM- and CI-like asteroids in the belt, these results imply limited mixing of carbonaceous reservoirs and isolation of the CI reservoir.

Metadata

arXiv ID: 2603.09749
Provider: ARXIV
Primary Category: astro-ph.EP
Published: 2026-03-10
Fetched: 2026-03-11 06:02

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Raw Data (Debug)
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