Building Earth With Pebbles Made Of Chondritic Components

Pebble accretion provides new insights into Earth’s building blocks and early protoplanetary disk conditions.

Here, we show that mixtures of chondritic components: metal grains, chondrules, calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs), and amoeboid olivine aggregates (AOAs) match Earth’s major element composition (Fe, Ni, Si, Mg, Ca, Al, O) within uncertainties, whereas no combination of chondrites and iron meteorites does.

Our best fits also match the ϵ54Cr and ϵ50Ti values of Earth precisely, whereas the best fits for chondrites, or components with a high proportion of E chondrules, fail to match Earth. In contrast to some previous studies, our best-fitting component mixture is predominantly carbonaceous, rather than enstatite chondrules.

It also includes 15 wt% of early-formed refractory inclusions (CAIs + AOAs), which is similar to that found in some C chondrites (CO, CV, CK), but notably higher than NC chondrites. High abundances of refractory materials are lacking in NC chondrites, because they formed after the majority of refractory grains were either drawn into the Sun or incorporated into terrestrial protoplanets via pebble accretion.

We show that combinations of Stokes numbers of chondritic components build 0.35-0.7 Earth masses in 2 My in the Hill regime accretion, for a typical pebble column density of 1.2 kg/m² at 1 au. However, a larger or smaller column density leads to super-Earth or moon-mass bodies, respectively. Our calculations also demonstrate that a few My of pebble accretion with these components yields a total protoplanet mass inside 1 au exceeding the combined masses of Earth, Moon, Venus, and Mercury.

Accordingly, we conclude that pebble accretion is a viable mechanism to build Earth and its major element composition from primitive chondritic components within the solar nebula lifetime.

Schematic of the secular variation of the early solar system materials. (a) 0-0.7 My: The refractory grains condense close to the Sun. Some refractory grains scattered to the outer solar system by turbulent diffusion are ultimately incorporated in later-formed bodies. Metal grains and the early generation of chondrules form further away from the Sun. Planetesimal formation takes place at this stage by gravitational or streaming instabilities (Johansen and Lambrechts, 2017). (b) ~1-2 My: Chondrule production continues. Protoplanets form by pebble accretion. Chondrite accretion begins. (c) ~2-4 My: Chondrule production and pebble accretion continue with some addition of C chondrules to the inner solar system bodies due to incomplete capture by Jupiter (Johansen et al., 2021). Inner planets are not shown here. astro-ph.EP

Susmita Garai, Peter L. Olson, Zachary D. Sharp

Comments: 9 figures, 57 pages (pre-print), accepted for publication at the Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (GCA)
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2507.16057 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2507.16057v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2507.16057
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Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gca.2024.11.021
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Submission history
From: Susmita Garai
[v1] Mon, 21 Jul 2025 20:47:54 UTC (2,626 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16057

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