Abstrakt
The largest impact ever to occur in the inner Solar System was probably the collision of a Mars-to nearly Earthsized object with the proto-Earth, leading to the formation of the Earth's Moon [1-4]. Such a large event could have produced a huge number of fragmentsthat would been ejected from cis-lunar space.
Many of these would have become Main-Belt-crossing, either by direct injection onto high eccentricity orbits or via planetary encounters/resonances. In some ways, this representsthe reverse of the modern meteorite-delivery process.
When these objects moved into the Main Belt, they would have had high relative velocities with the objects there (> 10 km/s), much higher than the velocities of background asteroidal objects(~5 km/s). By combining their large numbers with their high speeds, we find these objects would have dominated impact heating in the Main Belt close to the time of the giant impact.
This putative pulse that simulations show would then decay over ~100 Ma [5], and might be identifiable in the meteoritic record.