* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Diogenites

Blobrana · L

New Clues To The Early Solar System From Ancient Meteorites

Diogenites are a kind of meteorite that may have come from the asteroid Vesta, or a similar body. They represent some of the Solar System's oldest existing examples of heat-related chemical processing. What's more, Vesta or their other parent bodies were large enough to have undergone a similar degree of differentiation to Earth, thus forming a kind of scale model of a terrestrial planet.
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Blobrana · L

Ancient diogenite study changes planet solidification time frame

A new analysis of diogenites - meteorites that may have come to Earth from nearby asteroids - presented in the journal Nature Geoscience and reviewed at the Eureka Alert web site on July 22, 2012, offers evidence of a shortened time frame for our solar systems planets solidification into the present layers as well as a source for rare elements in the Earth's crust.
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Blobrana · L

New clues to the early Solar System from ancient meteorites

In order to understand Earth's earliest history--its formation from Solar System material into the present-day layering of metal core and mantle, and crust--scientists look to meteorites. New research from a team including Carnegie's Doug Rumble and Liping Qin focuses on one particularly old type of meteorite called diogenites. These samples were examined using an array of techniques, including precise analysis of certain elements for important clues to some of the Solar System's earliest chemical processing. Their work is published online July 22 by Nature Geoscience.
The team examined seven diogenites from Antarctica and two that landed in the African desert. They were able to confirm that these samples came from no fewer than two parent bodies and that the crystallisation of their minerals occurred about 4.6 billion years ago, only 2 million years after condensation of the oldest solids in the Solar System.
Remarkably, these results demonstrate that accretion, core formation, primary differentiation, and late accretion were all accomplished in just over 2 to 3 million years on some parent bodies. In the case of Earth, there followed crust formation, the development of an atmosphere, and plate tectonics, among other geologic processes, so the evidence for this early period is no longer preserved.
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