Recently, the researchers have come across some novel clues concerning the evolution of our Solar System with the help of magnetic fields held in grains of an ancient meteorite that crashed in India in 1940.
As per the Astronomy Magazine, the researchers have studied the magnetic fields within the bits of meteorite, which revealed that the shock waves moving with the cloud of dusty gas around the sun seemed to be a significant component in solar system’s formation.
Although the solar system is thought to become created around 4.5 billion years back, the development process left lots of construction debris behind. One of the most helpful bits of debris would be the earliest kinds of meteorites, known as the chondrites, which haven’t transformed much since they created at the birth of the solar system.
Chondrites are made mainly from small stony grains, known as chondrules which are barely a millimeter in diameter.
“Chondrules themselves created through quick melting events within the dusty gas cloud — the solar nebula — that encircled the young sun. As chondrules cooled, iron-bearing minerals within them became magnetized like bits on the hard disk through the local magnetic field in the gas. These magnetic fields are maintained within the chondrules even down to the current day,” Arizona State University researchers stated.
The study authors plotted the magnetic fields of the chondrule grains that originated from a meteorite named Semarkona — a space rock weighing around 1.5 pound that fell in India in 1940. Researchers discovered that the meteorite were built with a magnetic area, much like that at Earth’s surface.
The co-author of the study Steve Desch stated, “The recent experiments probe magnetic minerals in chondrules never measured before. Additionally, they reveal that each chondrule is magnetized just like a little bar magnet, however, with ‘north’ pointing in random directions.”
This explains they became magnetized before these were built in the meteorite, not while located on Earth’s surface, Desch said.
Desch explains, “My modeling for the heating events shows that shock waves passing through the solar nebula is exactly melted most chondrules. The background magnetic field could be amplified by up to 30 times, depending on the strength and size of the shock wave.”
The study is published in the Science journal on 13th Novemeber.