A little over four and a half billion years ago, dust circling our young sun was collecting into balls that would become planets. Heat from radioactive decay melted these balls of dust into blobs of molten rock, growing as they accumulated more material. A small piece of one of these molten objects broke away and traveled around the solar system for eons before falling to Earth as a meteorite in the Algerian desert. Now, very accurate dating of this meteorite is giving new insight into the formation of the Solar System. The work, by an international team including Professor Qingzhu Yin and colleagues at the UC Davis Department of Earth and Planetary Science and collaborators at Australian National University, was published Aug. 29 in Nature Communications.
A new study of an old meteorite contradicts current thinking about how rocky planets like the Earth and Mars acquire volatile elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and noble gases as they form.
An asteroid that exploded over Botswana in 2018 likely came from Vesta, the second largest object in the asteroid belt, according to an analysis of rocks recovered after the impact.
