Abstract

The passage of heat throughout a planetary body is one of the fundamental processes that drives their long-term behaviour and evolution. The textures and compositions of different meteorites demonstrates that asteroids contained different amounts of heat, and as such displayed very different thermochemical evolutions. In this talk, I will present model results of the thermal evolution of different asteroids with the aim of uncovering how these bodies generated and transported heat. I will also use these results to predict when different asteroids could have generated magnetic fields through core dynamo activity. I will compare the models results with the textures and the magnetic remanences carried by a number of meteorites to recover some key properties of the parent asteroids of different meteorite groups. These results elucidate the key processes that occurred with asteroids and the physical properties that controlled how these bodies behaved across their active lifetimes.