carbonaceous chondrites tagged posts

Minerals in Ancient Meteorites offer Insights into the Origin of Most of the Earth’s Surface

meteorites
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Dr. Alice Stephant, an astrophysicist, is helping to solve a longstanding mystery about water on Earth: where it came from.

Scientists long thought that water, which covers 70% of the Earth, is probably rare or non-existent on other planets. The assumption was that water on Earth resulted from a unique series of galactic events billions of years ago.

Stephant, who works at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy’s capital Rome, is challenging these longstanding assumptions.

She has produced research that suggests the chemical components of water—hydrogen and oxygen—could have come from the giant cloud of dust and gas that gave rise to Earth’s solar system.

If water from that cloud could go directly into forming planets, it could...

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Solar System formed from ‘Poorly Mixed Cake Batter,’ Isotope Research shows

Meteorite thin section courtesy Nicole Xike Nie.
Caption:  A meteorite thin section under a microscope. Different colors represent different minerals, because light travels through them in different ways. The round mineral aggregates are chondrules, which are a major component in primitive meteorites. Credit: Nicole Xike Nie.

Earth’s potassium arrived by meteoritic delivery service finds new research led by Carnegie’s Nicole Nie and Da Wang. Their work, published in Science, shows that some primitive meteorites contain a different mix of potassium isotopes than those found in other, more-chemically processed meteorites. These results can help elucidate the processes that shaped our solar system and determined the composition of its planets.

“The extreme conditions found in stellar interiors enable stars to manufacture elements usi...

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Meteorites plus Gamma Rays could have given Earth the Building Blocks for Life

Close up of chondrite meteorite, an orange and grey rock
The building blocks of life, amino acids, could have been formed in early meteorites, such as the one shown here.
Credit: abriendomundo/Shutterstock.com

Even as detailed images of distant galaxies from the James Webb Space Telescope show us more of the greater universe, scientists still disagree about how life began here on Earth. One hypothesis is that meteorites delivered amino acids – life’s building blocks – to our planet. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have experimentally shown that amino acids could have formed in these early meteorites from reactions driven by gamma rays produced inside the space rocks.

Ever since Earth was a newly formed, sterile planet, meteorites have been hurtling through the atmosphere at high speeds toward its surface...

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Earth and Mars were formed from Inner Solar System Material

Camera Name: Color Camera Nikon DS-Fi3 Numerical Aperture: 0.08 Refractive Index: 1 Camera Settings: Camera Type: Nikon DS-Fi3 Binning: 1.0×1.0 Exposure: 67 ms Gain: 2.0x Sharpness: Medium Brightness: 0.00 Hue: 0.00 Saturation: 0.00 WB Red: 1.96 WB Blue: 2.97 Scene Mode: Neutral Microscope Settings: Microscope: Manual Microscope

Earth and Mars were formed from material that largely originated in the inner solar system; only a few percent of the building blocks of these two planets originated beyond Jupiter’s orbit. A group of researchers led by the University of Münster (Germany) report these findings today in the journal Science Advances...

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