The classic way of giving birth to planets
According to current models, planets are born from the remains of stars. Stars form from a nebula of a dust-gas cloud when a dense cluster of material collapses under gravity. This cluster rotates and packs more material from itself in the cloud, creating a disk swirling around a new star. In the disk, dust and gases further accumulate, creating the nuclei of planets and planetary systems.
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According to indications from our own solar system, this system seems to have formed in the same way, about 4.6 billion years ago. However, the answer to the question of how and when individual elements were incorporated into planetary bodies is more complicated.
According to current models, volatile gases became part of the planets at a time when these planets formed from the solar nebula. Because the planet is hot and mushy at this stage, these volatiles are released into the global igneous ocean, which is the forming planet, and as the planetary mantle cools, they escape, partly in gaseous form, into the atmosphere.
Additional volatiles will provide the planet with meteorite bombardment, as volatiles bound in carbonaceous meteorites, called chondrites, are released after these meteorites disintegrate on impact with the planet.
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The interior of the planet should thus reflect the composition of the solar nebula, while the composition of its atmosphere is mainly influenced by volatile substances originating from meteorites. The difference between the two sources can be recognized, for example, by the isotope ratios of the noble gases, in particular krypton.
Mars as a good example
And because Mars formed and solidified relatively quickly (in about four million years, while it took an estimated 100 million years for the Earth to compare), it is a good formula for the very early stages of the planet formation process.
“We can reconstruct the distribution of volatiles during the first few million years of the solar system,” says geochemist Sandrine Péron, formerly of the University of California, Davis and now the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
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Of course, this requires input information, and it is in this direction, according to scientists, that the meteorite from Chassigny is literally and literally a gift from heaven. Its composition of noble gases differs from the composition of the Martian atmosphere, suggesting that a piece of rock detached from the Martian planetary mantle and ejected into space, originally coming from a planetary interior formed from the solar nebula.
However, measuring the exact isotope ratios of krypton is relatively difficult and not always successful. Therefore, Péron, together with a colleague from the University of California, geochemist Sujoy Mukhopadhyay, used a new technique using a rare gas laboratory at the university’s disposal.
Something is different…
But this new measurement showed a strange thing. The ratio of krypton isotopes in the Chassigny meteorite was close to the ratio we associate with chondrites. And he looked remarkably like them. “The inner composition of Mars is almost purely chondritic,” Péron said. “It’s very clear.”
According to her, this suggests that meteorites brought volatile substances to Mars much earlier than scientists had previously thought, that is, before the solar nebula was scattered by solar radiation.
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If this theory is correct, then the order of events was as follows: Mars acquired the atmosphere from the solar nebula after its global igneous ocean cooled; otherwise, the chondritic and nebulae gases would be much more mixed than the team noted.
But that means another mystery. So if the sun’s rays eventually burned the remnants of the nebula, it should have burned the nebula’s atmosphere on Mars. But atmospheric krypton had to be preserved somewhere. According to the team, maybe in polar ice caps. “But that would require Mars to be cold immediately after its accretion,” Mukhopadhyay said.
According to him, the study, by pointing to the chondritic gases inside Mars, raises interesting questions about the origin and composition of the early atmosphere of Mars.
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