Related papers: Carbon Star Dust from Meteorites
The origin of Mercury's anomalous core and low FeO surface mineralogy are outstanding questions in planetary science. Mercury's composition may result from cosmochemical controls on the precursor solids that accreted to form Mercury. High…
Three decades ago the first convincing evidence of microbial fossils in carbonaceous chondrites was discovered and reported by Hans Dieter Pflug and his collaborators. In addition to morphology, other data, notably laser mass spectroscopy,…
Cement mineral tobermorite was formed in hydrothermal experiments on alternation of calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs) in carbonaceous chondrite meteorites. Unidentified bands at 14 microns were measured for CAIs and the matrix of the…
A review of the abundances and condensation temperatures of the elements and their nuclides in the solar nebula and in chondritic meteorites. Abundances of the elements in some neighboring stars are also discussed.
Terrestrial exoplanets likely form initial atmospheres through outgassing during and after accretion, although there is currently no first-principles understanding of how to connect a planet's bulk composition to its early atmospheric…
Laboratory analyses on fine-grained diamond residues from primitive meteorites have shown that nano-diamonds represent the most abundant form of presolar dust preserved in meteoritic samples. The presolar diamonds carry isotopic anomalies…
The compositions of planet-forming disks are set by a combination of material inherited from the interstellar medium and material reprocessed during disk formation and evolution. Indeed, comets and primitive meteorites exhibit…
As some of the most ancient materials in our Solar System, chondritic meteorites offer a valuable window into the early stages of planetary formation, particularly the accretion processes that built the most primitive asteroids. Until now,…
Interstellar dust models are facing a "carbon crisis", so called because recent observations suggest that the abundance of carbon available for dust in the interstellar medium is less than half of the amount required to be tied up in…
We are living in a dusty universe: dust is ubiquitously seen in a wide variety of astrophysical environments, ranging from circumstellar envelopes around cool red giants to supernova ejecta, from diffuse and dense interstellar clouds and…
Star formation occurs in dark molecular regions where the number density of hydrogen nuclei, nH, exceeds 10^4 cc and the fractional ionization is 10^-7 or less. Dust grains with sizes ranging up to tenths of microns and perhaps down to tens…
Condensation processes, which are responsible for the main chemical differences between gas and solids in the Galaxy, are the major mechanisms that control the cycle of dust from evolved stars to planetary systems. However, they are still…
Extensive photometric stellar surveys show that many main sequence stars show emission at infrared and longer wavelengths that is in excess of the stellar photosphere; this emission is thought to arise from circumstellar dust. The presence…
We present a model of the interaction of interstellar dust grains with a stellar environment, that predicts the distribution of interstellar dust grains in the size range between $0.1 {\rm \mu m}$ and $1 {\rm \mu m}$ around a star for the…
Observational evidence seems to indicate that the depletion of interstellar carbon into dust shows rather wide variations and that carbon undergoes rather rapid recycling in the interstellar medium (ISM). Small hydrocarbon grains are…
We analyze findings of the Stardust mission that brought to the Earth dust from the 81P/Wild 2 coma. Just as the data of the Deep Impact mission to 9P/Tempel 1, they are at odds with the widely accepted condensation/sublimation comet…
Our Sun, like all stars, formed within a cold molecular cloud. Astronomical observations and theory provide considerable detail into this process. Yet cosmochemical observations of short lived radionuclides in primitive meteorites, in…
Micron-sized stardust grains that originated in ancient stars are recovered from meteorites and analysed using high-resolution mass spectrometry. The most widely studied type of stardust is silicon carbide (SiC). Thousands of these grains…
The analysis of noble gases in primitive meteorites has shown the existence of anomalous isotopic abundances when compared with the average Solar System values. In particular it has been found that some graphite grains contain a unexpected…
Models of the zodiacal cloud's thermal emission and sporadic meteoroids suggest Jupiter-family comets (JFCs) as the dominant source of interplanetary dust. However, comet sublimation is insufficient to sustain the quantity of dust presently…