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A collisional history of the L chondrite parent bodies

Nature Astronomy volume 9, pages 1455–1463 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

L chondrites are some of the most common meteorites retrieved on Earth. Their Ar–Ar collision ages indicate a major disruption of their parent body ~470 million years ago (Ma), which was followed by an intense meteorite shower on Earth that is linked to the Ordovician biological crisis. However, recent but previously scarce chronological and geochemical data on a few L chondrites hint at a more complex evolution of the parent body than a single, one-stage 470 Ma break-up. Here we conducted a unique coordinated mineralogical and geochronological study on eight shocked L chondrites, which showed a wide distribution of collisional ages at 4,500, 4,470, ~700, 470 and ~10 Ma. The lower-limit sizes of the parent body derived from shock timescales, combined with the orbital parameters and the aforementioned ages of the meteorites, indicate a complex collisional cascade endured by the parent body of the L chondrites, pointing towards several L chondrite sources in the asteroid main belt, namely, the Nysa–Polana, Juno, Gefion 2 and potentially Massalia asteroid families.

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Fig. 1: Examples of Wetherill concordias for Acfer 040 and Sahara 99016.
Fig. 2: Distribution of the upper-intercept ages.
Fig. 3: Distribution of the lower-intercept ages.
Fig. 4: Summary of the proposed collisional history of the L chondrite parent body.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available at https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.06939 (ref. 67).

Code availability

The code that supports the findings of this study is openly available at https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.06939 (ref. 67).

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Acknowledgements

We thank L. Marié from the CEREGE for engineering Tenham and Beni M’Hira sections and A. Bischoff and the Institut für Planetologie for lending most of the sections (all except Sixiangkou, Beni m’Hira and two of the Tenham sections), as well as A. Rubin and the University of California, Los Angeles, for lending the Sixiangkou section. We thank O. Beyssac for his assistance with the Raman spectrometry. We thank L. Remusat and P. Beck for their advice on the presentation of the results. We thank N. Bouden and J. Villeneuve for assisting with the SIMS analyses. Support was granted by the French ‘Classy’ ANR (Grant Number ANR-17-CE31-0004) to M.R. and ANR ORIGINS (Grant Number ANR18-CE31-0014), the Programme National de Planétologie and the French space agency CNES to M.D. This work has made use of data from the Asteroid Family Portal, the JPL Small Body Database and the Minor Planet Physical Properties Catalogues MP3C.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Planetary Habitability (PHAB), Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Marine Ciocco

  2. Institut de Minéralogie, de Physique des Matériaux et de Cosmochimie (IMPMC), CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France

    Marine Ciocco, Mathieu Roskosz, Béatrice Doisneau, Guillaume Fiquet & Matthieu Gounelle

  3. Université de Lorraine, CNRS, CRPG, Nancy, France

    Etienne Deloule

  4. Laboratoire Lagrange, UNS-CNRS, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Nice, France

    Marco Delbo

  5. School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Marco Delbo

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  1. Marine Ciocco
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Contributions

M.C., M.R., M.G., M.D. and E.D. contributed to the redaction of the paper. M.C., M.R., G.F. and M.G. developed the study. M.C. and B.D. acquired the scanning electron microscopy maps. M.C. acquired the Raman spectra. E.D. performed the SIMS analyses with assistance from M.C. M.D. produced the age model and statistical codes and analysed the asteroidal spectra.

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Correspondence to Marine Ciocco.

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Ciocco, M., Roskosz, M., Doisneau, B. et al. A collisional history of the L chondrite parent bodies. Nat Astron 9, 1455–1463 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-025-02615-6

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