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Artist illustration of the first solar disk, with a picture embedded in a blue crystal of hibonite, one first minerals to form in the solar system. The Field Museum, University of Chicago, NASA, ESA, and E. Feild (STScl)
The ancient and rare blue crystals of the dawn of the solar system help to confirm that the newborn sun was violently active, reports a new study. 19659005] Astronomers have previously found that stars are typically incredibly energetic very early in their evolution. Scientists had suspected that the same was true of the sun after its birth about 4.6 billion years ago.
"The sun was very active in his first life – he had more eruptions and gave off a more intense stream of charged particles" Philipp Heck, a co-author of the study, a curator at Field Chicago Museum, said in a statement. "I think about my son – he's three, he's also very active." [Solar Quiz: How Well Do You Know the Sun?]
However, proving this "early active sun hypothesis" is difficult because it is difficult to find material that recorded what the primitive sun was and that also survived billions of dollars. 39 years unscathed.
Researchers analyzed samples of the Murchison meteorite, which crashed in 1969 near the town of Murchison, Murchison Province. Australian state of Victoria. This meteorite, preserved at the Chicago Field Museum, dates from the beginning of the solar system and is recognized in the scientific community for its abundance of organic molecules
as the giant disk of gas and dust that surrounded the early sun cooled. About 4.5 billion years ago, the first minerals began to form: microscopic ice-blue crystals called hibonites, the largest of which measured only a few times the diameter of a hair human
. Study professor Levke Kööp, a cosmochemist from the University of Chicago, told Space.com.
If the primitive sun spit out a lot of energetic particles, some of them would have had to hit calcium and aluminum in the crystals, dividing these atoms into smaller neon and helium atoms . This evidence of an early active sun could have remained unscathed unscathed in the crystals for billions of years and be incorporated into the rocks that eventually fell to Earth for scientists to study.
Scientists have analyzed the crystals using a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer in Switzerland – a garage-sized machine that can determine the chemical composition of. an object A laser melted tiny grains of hibonite crystals and the mass spectrometer then analyzed its contents
The mass spectrometer was specifically designed to look for traces of rare gases, such as 39, helium and neon. The researchers found a surprisingly large signal clearly showing the presence of helium and neon.
This is perhaps the first concrete evidence of the early activity of the sun, long suspected, according to the researchers.
"It is exciting that we have been able to find this rare gas register in the hibonites." Kööp says.
There were earlier allusions that the newborn sun was more active than today, like traces of radioactive beryllium-10 found in ancient meteorites. However, it was possible that such a beryllium-10 is not produced by early solar activity but that it is inherited from the original molecular cloud of the solar system. In contrast, neon and helium are rare gases, which means that they almost never react with other chemicals. As such, their presence in the hibonites suggests that they were produced inside the crystals, rather than being trapped inside the hibonites as and when their formation
around the sun which finally gave birth to the planets, like the heat or the cold of the different parts of this disc.
"For example, helium is a very light element and is easily lost minerals during heating," Kööp said. "The presence of helium in the hibonites means that they were not heated much after their irradiation."
Scientists detailed their findings online Monday, July 30 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi . Follow us on @Spacedotcom Facebook and Google+. Originally posted on Space.com
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