Update on the 53Mn-53Cr ages of dolomite in the Ivuna CI chondrite and asteroid Ryugu sample

Abstract

Aqueous alteration in planetesimals is one of the earliest geological processes in the solar system. The timing of aqueous alteration sheds light on the timescale of material evolution through water–rock interaction in small bodies. The ⁵³Mn-⁵³Cr decay system, where a short-lived radionuclide ⁵³Mn decays to ⁵³Cr with a half-life of 3.7 Myr, is a powerful tool for dating carbonates in primitive meteorites that formed during aqueous alteration. In CI chondrites and samples returned from asteroid Ryugu, a major carbonate mineral is dolomite (CaMg(CO₃)₂) and could be dated precisely because of their relatively high Mn abundances. However, the lack of a proper dolomite standard for secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) hinders us from obtaining accurate Mn/Cr ratios of carbonates, resulting in erroneous formation ages. In this work, we synthesized Mn-, Cr-, and Fe-bearing crystalline dolomite as standard materials and evaluated the relative sensitivity factor (RSF) of Mn/Cr for SIMS analysis, namely, the ratio of Mn/Cr obtained using SIMS to true Mn/Cr. We found that the RSF values of the dolomite standards range from 0.8 to 0.9, slightly higher than that of calcite (CaCO₃) (∼0.7), and increase with their Fe contents. We used the newly evaluated RSF values to date dolomite in the Ivuna CI chondrite and obtained an initial ⁵³Mn/⁵⁵Mn ratio of (3.95 ± 0.49) × 10⁻⁶ (95 % confidence interval) and the corresponding absolute age of 4564.0 + 0.6/−0.7 Ma. Our new initial ⁵³Mn/⁵⁵Mn ratio is 26 ± 19 % higher than that obtained by a previous study for the same dolomite grain using a calcite standard. This difference is consistent with the difference between the RSF values of dolomite and calcite. Based on these results, we updated the initial ⁵³Mn/⁵⁵Mn ratio previously reported for dolomite in the Ryugu sample A0058 to be (3.21 ± 0.66) × 10⁻⁶, which corresponds to an absolute age of 4562.8 + 1.0/−1.2 Ma. This age seems to be the best estimate for the formation age of dolomite in Ryugu currently available.