Related papers: Carbon Star Dust from Meteorites
Exocomets are small bodies releasing gas and dust which orbit stars other than the Sun. Their existence was first inferred from the detection of variable absorption features in stellar spectra in the late 1980s using spectroscopy. More…
We employ analytical and numerical chemical evolution models to study observed trends in abundance ratios involving carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Several sets of published stellar yields for both intermediate-mass and massive stars are…
If the photospheres of solar-type stars represent the composition of circumstellar disks from which any planets formed, spectroscopic determinations of stellar elemental abundances offer information on the composition of those planets,…
Chondrules are thought to have formed during transient flash-heating events in dust-enriched regions of the solar protoplanetary disk. Although laboratory studies have characterized the oxygen isotopic compositions of chondritic materials,…
There is a long-standing discussion in the astrophysical/astrochemical community as to the structure and morphology of dust grains in various astrophysical environments (e.g., interstellar clouds, protostellar envelopes, protoplanetary and…
Meteorites are a remarkable resource. They capture the imagination of people worldwide with their spectacular entry through Earth's atmosphere as fireballs, and their exotic character of being pieces of other worlds. Scientifically, they…
It has been proposed, or confirmed, that diamond nanoparticles exist in various environments in space: close to active galactic nuclei, in the vicinity of supernovae and pulsars, in the interior of several planets in the Solar system, in…
Hydrocarbon mixtures are extremely abundant in the Universe, and diamond formation from them can play a crucial role in shaping the interior structure and evolution of planets. With first-principles accuracy, we first estimate the diamond…
The detection of exoplanets and accretion disks around newborn stars has spawned new ideas and models of how our Solar System formed and evolved. Meteorites as probes of geologic deep time can provide ground truth to these models. In…
Protoplanetary disks are dust-rich structures around young stars. The crystalline and amorphous materials contained within these disks are variably thermally processed and accreted to make bodies of a wide range of sizes and compositions,…
The abundance evolution of interstellar dust species originating from stellar sources and from condensation in molecular clouds in the local interstellar medium of the Milky Way is studied and the input of dust material to the Solar System…
This chapter discusses Galactic dust and how its thermal emission confuses CMBR measurements. Interstellar dust grains are composed of many differing species, and observational evidence has only begun to disentagle their composition and…
Large dust grains can fluctuate dramatically in their local density, relative to gas, in neutral, turbulent disks. Small, high-redshift galaxies (before reionization) represent ideal environments for this process. We show via simple…
The temperatures of observed protoplanetary disks are not sufficiently high to produce the accretion rate needed to form stars, nor are they sufficient to explain the volatile depletion patterns in CM, CO, and CV chondrites and terrestrial…
Planetary formation is an efficient process now thought to take place on a relatively short astronomical time scale. Recent observations have shown that the dust surrounding a protostar emits more efficiently at longer wavelengths as the…
Carbonaceous chondrite meteorites are known for having high water and organic material contents, including amino acids. Here we address the origin of amino acids in the warm interiors of their parent bodies (planetesimals) within a few…
Electric discharges were detected directly in the cloudy atmospheres of Earth, Jupiter and Saturn, are debatable for Venus, and indirectly inferred for Neptune and Uranus in our solar system. Sprites (and other types of transient luminous…
We investigate the impact of dust-induced gas fragmentation on the formation of the first low-mass, metal-poor stars (< 1Msun) in the early universe. Previous work has shown the existence of a critical dust-to-gas ratio, below which dust…
Major element fractionation among chondrites has been discussed for decades as ratios relative to Si or Mg. Expressing ratios relative to Fe leads to a new relationship admitting the possibility that ordinary chondrite meteorites are…
The solar system contains solids of all sizes, ranging from km-size bodies to nano-sized particles. Nanograins have been detected in situ in the Earth's atmosphere, near cometary and giant planet environments, and more recently in the solar…