Illustration of the early solar disk, with an inset image of a blue hibonite crystal, one of the first minerals to form in the Solar System. Credit: © Field Museum, University of Chicago, NASA, ESA, and E. Feild (STScl).
By examining tiny blue crystals trapped inside meteorites, scientists were able to figure out what the sun was like before the Earth formed – and apparently, it had a pretty rowdy start. When scientists analyzed the chemical make-up of these crystals, they found atoms that would only be there if the early sun was spitting out lots of high-energy particles – the solar version of going through the ‘terrible twos.’
Our Sun’s beginnings are a mystery. It burst into being 4.6 billion years ago, about 50 million years before the Earth formed...
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