![]() “These crystals formed over 4.5 billion years ago and preserve a record of some of the first events that took place in our solar system,” said first author Levke Kööp, a UChicago postdoctoral scholar. Their composition bears earmarks of nuclear reactions that only would have occurred if the early sun was spitting lots of energetic particles. ![]() The study examined microscopic ice-blue crystals called hibonite. They’re probably the first minerals that formed in the solar system.” “Almost nothing in the solar system is old enough to really confirm the early sun’s activity, but these minerals from meteorites in the Field Museum’s collections are old enough. ![]() I think of my son: He’s three he’s very active too,” said study co-author Philipp Heck, associate curator at the Field Museum and part-time associate professor at the University of Chicago. “The sun was very active in its early life-it had more eruptions and gave off a more intense stream of charged particles. But in a new study in Nature Astronomy by scientists with the University of Chicago, the Field Museum and ETH Zurich, ancient blue crystals trapped in meteorites reveal what the early sun was like.Īnd apparently, it had a pretty rowdy start. Since the sun is older than the Earth, it’s hard to find physical objects that were around in the sun’s earliest days that bear chemical records. It burst into being 4.6 billion years ago, about 50 million years before the Earth formed.
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