We may joke about looking for a needle in a haystack, but that’s nothing compared to searching for stardust in a foil! A new paper published in Science reveals that such work has led to the discovery of seven dust particles that are not only out of this world, they’re out of this solar system.
The Tawani International Expedition team went to Antarctica in 2012 to prepare for meteorite collection with the Geological Survey of India and to study life in ice covered lakes. The video blogs are now online. The expedition was supported by the Tawani Foundation, the Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies, and the Trottier Family Foundation.
Field Museum researchers co-author a paper on a previously unknown type of meteorite that was found fossilized in a 470 million year old seabed.
A Field Museum research loan of iron meteorites that were made available to a group of researches in Germany led to the most accurate chronology to date of planetary core formation.
The group’s study finds that planetary cores formed very fast in geological terms, in about 1 million years after the first solids condensed in the solar system. For the first time the study finds also that cores of the parent bodies of different iron meteorites formed at different times. This was previously unknown and unresolvable because the analytical methods were not precise enough.
One of our main research interests at the Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritics and Polar Studies is the study of presolar grains. This BrainScoop episode with Philipp Heck (Robert A. Pritzker Associate Curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies) explains what presolar grains are. Watch it here.