Published · yesterdayScience3 min read
The oldest grains we have were magnetised before the sun finished forming
An MIT-led team reports remanent magnetization in calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions from an Antarctic meteorite, pushing the earliest known nebular field ten times closer to time zero.
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What happened
- An MIT-led team measured magnetic records in DOM 08006, a meteorite recovered from the Dominion Range in Antarctica in 2008.
- The grains carrying the record, calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, formed in the solar system's first 200,000 years and are the oldest known solar system material.
- The team estimates the nebular field was stronger than Earth's field today and credits it with helping draw primordial matter into the early sun.
- The group's previous earliest magnetic evidence dated to 2 million years in, when the sun already existed and planets were starting to form.
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Why it matters
- capabilityPaleomagnetic measurement now reaches into the interval the field left no other trace of, so the cloud-to-disk step becomes something a laboratory can constrain rather than only a model can assert.
- exposureOne Antarctic stone's pristine mineralogy carries the whole reading; if those inclusions were reheated or wetted on a parent body, the earliest data point on solar system magnetism disappears with...
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Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
- [1]
Around 4.6 billion years ago the solar system was a ball of gas and dust; over the next few million years the solar nebula flattened into a disk that condensed to form the central sun and orbiting planets.
ReportedView cited source - [2]
The team analysed samples of DOM 08006, a meteorite discovered in 2008 in the Dominion Range, a mountain range along the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.
ReportedView cited source - [3]
The microscopic grains studied, calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs), originally formed during the solar system's first 200,000 years, making them the oldest known solar system material.
ReportedView cited source - [4]
The researchers estimate the nebular magnetic field was stronger than Earth's magnetic field today and likely played a significant role in pulling together primordial matter to form the early sun.
ReportedView cited source - [5]
Benjamin Weiss, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at MIT, says the transition from spherical cloud to protoplanetary disk has long been theorised to be caused by gravity, but the team's measurements show magnetism likely played a role.
- [6]
As disk material condensed, tiny magnetic minerals would have locked in the strength of the magnetic field, preserving its original intensity over billions of years as remanent magnetization.
ReportedView cited source
Sources & coverage · 2 publishers
The reporting this story was synthesized from, earliest first. Every link goes to the original.
- discovermagazine.com3h agoMeteorite Samples Unveil Traces of Ancient Magnetic Field That May Have Helped Build the Solar System
Additional citations
- Benjamin Weiss, MIT
- Caue Borlina, first author, now assistant professor at Purdue
