Ever since scientists started looking at meteorites with microscopes, they've been puzzled - and fascinated - by what's inside. Most meteorites are made of tiny beads of glass that date back to the earliest days of the solar system, before the planets were even formed. Scientists with the University of Chicago have published an analysis laying out how these beads, which are found in many meteorites, came to be - and what they can tell us about what happened in the early solar system. "These are big questions," said UChicago alum Nicole Xike Nie, Ph.D.'19, a postdoctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science and first author of the study. "Meteorites are snapshots that can reveal the conditions this early dust experienced - which has implications for the evolution of both Earth and other planets." 'This question goes back 50 years' The beads of glass inside these meteorites are called chondrules. Scientists think they are bits of rock left over from the debris that was floating around billions of years ago, which eventually coalesced into the planets we now know and love. These are immensely useful to scientists, who can get their hands on pieces of the original stuff that comprised the solar system - before the constant churn of volcanoes and tectonic plates of Earth changed all the rock we can find on the planet itself. But what exactly caused the formation of these chondrules remains unclear. "We have the same theories we had 50 years ago," said study co-author and UChicago postdoctoral researcher Timo Hopp. "Even though there have been advances in many other areas, this one has been stubborn." Scientists can find clues about the early days of the solar system by looking at the types of a given element in a rock. Elements can come in several different forms, called isotopes, and the proportion in each rock varies according to what happened when that rock was born - how hot it was, whether it cooled slowly or was... |