The Oldest Metal in the Solar System

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics

Scientific paper

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Meteorites, Carbonaceous, Chondrites, Feni, Cai

Scientific paper

Shiny grains of metal in a type of stony meteorite called CH chondrites contain important information about conditions in the cloud of gas and dust from which the Sun and planets formed. Anders Meibom of the University of Hawaii (now at Stanford University) and his colleagues at U. Hawaii, NASA Ames Research Center, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics report that many grains of metallic iron-nickel have chemical zoning patterns expected for grains condensing from a cooling gas that has the composition of the Sun. They estimate that the gas was cooling at a rate of about 0.2 C per hour. This slow cooling implies that the grains formed in a large-scale heating episode in the nebula, not in a localized event. They suggest that heating of the disk surrounding the young Sun caused evaporation of the solid materials. The hot gas rose in clouds over a million kilometers across. The clouds cooled as they rose, causing the metal grains to form. This type of work bridges the gap between the chemical study of meteorites and the astronomical study of young stars.

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