When our Sun was a young star, 4.56 billion years ago, what is now our solar system was just a disk of rocky dust and gas. Over tens of millions of years, tiny pebbles of dust coalesced, like a snowball rolling larger and larger, to become kilometer-sized "planetesimals"—the building blocks of Earth and the other inner planets.
Researchers have long tried to understand the ancient environments in which these planetesimals formed. For example, water is now abundant on Earth, but has it always been? In other words, did the planetesimals that accreted into our planet contain water?
Now, a new study combines meteorite data with thermodynamic modeling and determines that the earliest inner solar system planetesimals must have formed in the presence of water, challenging current astrophysical models of the early solar system.
Read More: California Institute of Technology
Damanveer Grewal (Photo Credit: D. Grewal)