Meteorites may have been given too much credit for ‘building’ our Solar System

Excerpt from thespacereporter.com



Meteorites might not have had as much of

an impact as early planet formation as we thought.The space rocks are

commonly considered to be the building blocks of planets, but a new

study by MIT and Purdue scientists suggests that the rocks are merely a

byproduct of planet formation, not a crucial part in the process.

According to the study, meteorites are what was cast off when other

proto-planetary bodies collided in the early days of the Solar System.

The new theory, which was determined using computer simulations of

collisions in the early Solar System, counteracts the theory that

meteorites’ chondrules (small grains of molten droplets on their

surface) are remnants of collisions with gas and dust that eventually

formed planets.

“This tells us that meteorites aren’t actually representative of the

material that formed planets – they’re these smaller fractions of

material that are the byproduct of planet formation,” says Brandon

Johnson of MIT’s Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences department.

“But it also tells us the early solar system was more violent than we

expected: You had these massive sprays of molten material getting

ejected out from these really big impacts. It’s an extreme process.”

The collision models showed that bodies the size of the Moon formed

well before meteorites would have formed chondrules, suggesting that the

meteorites were not involved in building planets in the previously

accepted manner.

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Meteorites may have been given too much credit for ‘building’ our Solar System