Locked in a Meteorite, Memories of How Our Sun Behaved in Its Youth

Meteorites are spacefaring museums preserving physical and chemical information from a long-gone era.

The formation and evolution of our Solar System is one of the cornerstone problems of modern astronomy.

One widely accepted yet incomplete model suggests that a portion of large and dense molecular cloud collapsed at a point, to form a protostar and a protoplanetary disk surrounding it. As this proto-Sun evolved to a more stable form, the gas and dust surrounding it cooled and coagulated to form small and large bodies that we see today as asteroids, comets, rocky planets and gas giants. Read more.