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Ancient and rare blue crystals from the dawn of the solar system help that the newborn sun was violently active, a new study reports.
Astronomers previously found that stars are typically incredibly energetic very early in their evolution. Scientists had suspected it was born about 4.6 billion years ago.
"The sun was very active in its early life-it had more eruptions and gave off a more intense stream of charged particles," study co-author Philipp Heck, curator at The Field Museum in Chicago, said in a statement. "I think of my son-he's three; [Solar Quiz: How Well Do You Know the Sun?]
However, proving this "early active sun hypothesis" is challenging because it is difficult to find material that has been recorded over the past several years. 19659002] "Heck said in the statement."
To hunt for such evidence, the researchers analyzed the Murchison meteorite, which crashed in 1969 near the town of Murchison, in the Australian state of Victoria. This meteorite, which is kept at The Field Museum in Chicago, dates to the early solar system and is renowned in the scientific community for its abundance of organic molecules.
down about 4.5 billion years ago, the earliest minerals began to form-microscopic, ice-blue crystals named hibonites, the largest of which were only a few times the diameter of a human hair.
"They are likely among the first minerals Levke Kööp, study lead author, has been a cosmochemist at the University of Chicago, told Space.com.
If the early sun is spewed out of energetic particles, some of these should have struck calcium and aluminum in the crystals, splitting the atoms into smaller atoms of neon and helium. This article presents an overview of the evidence of an early phase of the epidemic.
"While noble gases are being studied in the past , nobody has tried this with hibonites before, "Kööp said. "
The scientists analyzed the crystals using a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer in Switzerland-a garage- machine that can determine an object's chemical makeup. A laser melted tiny grains of hibonite crystals, and the mass spectrometer then analyzed its contents.
The mass spectrometer was specially designed to look for traces of noble gases, such as helium and neon. The researchers found a surprisingly large signal clearly showing the presence of helium and neon.
This may be the first concrete evidence of the sun's long-term early activity, the researchers said.
"It is exciting that we were able to find this noble gas record in hibonites, because it strongly supports the early- active-sun hypothesis, "Kööp said.
There were more traces of radioactive beryllium-10 found in ancient meteorites. However, it was possible that such beryllium-10 was not generated by early solar activity but instead was inherited from the molecular cloud from which the solar system originated. In contrast, neon and helium are noble gases. As such, their presence in the hibonites suggests that they were produced inside the crystals, as they were formed in the form of
Future research on ancient meteorite crystals might help reveal details about the protoplanetary disk of gas and dust (19659002) "For example," "for example," is a very light element and is easily lost from minerals during heating, "Kööp said. "The presence of helium in the hibonites that they were not heated much after they were irradiated."
The scientists detailed their findings online Monday (July 30) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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