carbonaceous chondrites tagged posts

A fireball in the sky, accompanied by a bang, amazed hundreds of eyewitnesses in northern Germany in mid-September last year. The reason for the spectacle was a meteoroid entering the Earth’s atmosphere and partially burning up. One day after the observations, a citizen in Flensburg found a stone weighing 24.5 grams and having a fresh black fusion crust on the lawn of his garden.

Dieter Heinlein, coordinator of the German part of the European Fireball Network at the German Aerospace Center in Augsburg, directly recognized the stone as a meteorite and delivered the rock to experts at the “Institut für Planetologie” at Münster University (Germany). Prof...

Research team re-calculates distribution of volatile elements. Geologists gain new insights regarding the Earth’s composition by analyzing meteorites. They conclude that the building blocks that brought volatile elements to Earth have a chemical composition similar to that of primitive carbonaceous chondrites.

The study focuses on the distribution and origin of so-called volatile elements such as zinc, lead and sulphur, which have low boiling temperatures in space...

Researchers have discovered that carbonaceous chondrites, a class of meteorites, incorporated hydrated minerals along with organic material from the protoplanetary disk before the formation of planets. Scientists from the study published in the journal Space Science Reviews note that these meteorites played “an important role in the primordial Earth’s water enrichment” because they facilitated the transportation of volatile elements that were accumulated on the external regions of the so-called protoplanetary disk from which planets were formed more than 4.500 years ago. Earth was formed in an environment close to the Sun, very much reduced due to the relative lack of oxygen.

Carbonaceous chondrites come fro...

The colors represent the relative amounts of short-lived radioactive isotopes, such as iron-60, injected into a newly formed protoplanetary disk (seen face on with the protostar being the light purple blob in the middle) by a supernova shock wave. Credit: Image courtesy of Alan Boss

New evidence supporting the supernova shock theory of our Solar System’s origin. According to one longstanding theory, our Solar System’s formation was triggered by a shock wave from an exploding supernova. The shock wave injected material from the exploding star into a neighboring cloud of dust and gas, causing it to collapse in on itself and form the Sun and its surrounding planets...