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Most scientists dream of having an “Eureka!” moment – that precious moment when you realize that you have discovered something new, wonderful and important.
In the movies, we imagine this happening with a surge of epic music and maybe lightning bolts at the right time. As Professor Ryan C. Ogliore of Washington University in St. Louis says, however, the team of scientists he was a part of had a more anticlimatic build-up before his breakthrough.
“The first thing you think of is, ‘Oh, there’s something we’re doing wrong,'” Ogliore explained. “So we turn things around and watch again. If the strange thing is still there, then you think you’ve got something right.”
To be thorough, Ogliore and his team tested the anomalies they were studying in different ways, but time and time again their research came to the same hopeful conclusion.
“It was then that I was really convinced that was the right answer,” Ogliore recalls.
Their discovery? Ogliore – working alongside colleagues Lionel G. Vacher (who led the team), Clive Jones, Nan Liu and David A. Fike – had studied an ancient meteorite and learned that a massive star long dead played a role determining in the creation of our solar system. It’s a discovery they believe could be used to one day find the building blocks of life in other solar systems.
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A bit of background: After NASA’s Genesis mission in 2011 brought back solar wind samples, scientists discovered that the isotopes of oxygen on the Sun differ from those found on Earth. The most likely explanation was that cosmic matter, which would later form in our planets, was pounded by a burst of ultraviolet light.
But where does this light come from? Scientists have been unable to explain their findings – until now.
Vacher, Ogliore and their team of researchers found the answer in Acfer 094, a piece of an ancient asteroid found as a meteorite in Algeria over 30 years ago. As well as being one of the oldest meteorites ever discovered, it’s also the only meteorite that contains cosmic symplectite – or very heavy oxygen isotopes.
Ogliore then had the idea of measuring the isotopes of sulfur in the cosmic symplectite to study the ancient ultraviolet radiation that accompanied the birth of our universe.
Their breakthrough, as published in the journal Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry Law, was the finding that the light did not match the UV spectrum that would have come from our young sun, meaning the light had to come from a nearby star.
“We conclude that the Sun’s stellar neighbors, possibly O and B stars in a region of massive star formation, affected the composition of the primordial building blocks of the solar system,” the authors wrote in the study. They concluded by pointing out that isotopic anomalies are not compatible with the type of ultraviolet irradiation of hydrogen sulfide gas produced by the young Sun. It is, however, compatible with irradiation of hydrogen sulfide from neighboring massive stars.
This is why they believe that “a plausible scenario for the Sun’s birth environment” is that it occurred in “a large star cluster with at least one massive star (of type O or B) in its neighborhood “.
As Ogliore explained to Salon, this is a very big deal.
“I think the purpose of what I do and what scientists like me do is to understand how the solar system was formed,” Ogliore observed. “We know that the formation of planetary systems like ours is not uncommon in the universe or in the galaxy. I think understanding the formation of our solar system gives us an understanding of this general property. It’s super important. because there is probably life there, too, in these other planetary systems. “
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