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What did meteorites ever do for us?

If you’ve ever been to a construction site, you’ll know they can be messy places, with leftover rubble and bricks scattered everywhere. Solar systems are pretty much the same, except there’s no one around to tidy up afterwards. Instead, we still have the bits and pieces that went into building the planets floating around. Their compositions, amount of thermal processing and age open a window into the deep past and the formation of the Solar System. Four point six billion years ago, our Sun began to condense out of a cloud of gas. In the process, the gas settled into a spinning disc around the equatorial axis of the young star, condensing into dust as it cooled. Dust particles began to stick together, building up into larger pebbles, boulders, asteroids and protoplanets. During these early days there were dozens of protoplanets, some in chaotic orbits, and often colliding and scattering into a thousand shards. The early Solar System wasn’t for the faint hearted.

Today things are much calmer, but as we’ve seen, some of this debris still falls to Earth. On a world where all the original rock has been melted down and reprocessed through volcanic and tectonic activity over billions of years, or weathered by wind water and air, meteorites are pristine samples of the construction materials that went into Earth. They tell us much about how our planet formed. Through radioisotope dating of meteorites, it is possible to begin chronicling our Solar System’s early history and piecing together the different stages of planet formation.

The following pages provide further reading:

Chondrules and their Formation
What Meteorites Brought With Them

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