A group of scientists has found that the magnetic field preserved within an age-old meteorite is offering strong clues about the formation of planets in the early period of our solar system.
The strong evidence about the origin of the sun, planets and the solar system comes from a meteor, called Semarkona. The scientists have uncovered the meteorite in northern India where it has fallen in 1940.
According to the scientists, the major factor that led to the birth of planets and the formation of today’s solar system is the field’s exact measurements trapped in grains in the meteorite that suggest an intense magnetic field is rippling via the disk of gas and dust particles around the newborn sun.
Scientists said that it was the magnetic field that had driven a large amount of gas into the sun and thrown the remaining gas and dust grains to eventually collide and crash between each other for the formation of the initial seeds of terrestrial planets.
Roger Fu, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, said, “Explaining the rapid timescale in which these disks evolve in only a few million years has always remained a big mystery. It turns out that this magnetic field is strong enough to affect the motion of gas at a large scale, in a very significant way.”
Semarkona is considered to be among the most pristine and primitive relics from the earliest ages of our solar system.
For the study, the researchers examined the meteorite’s grains which helped then in determining the strength of their original magnetic field where they were created.
The study was published in the journal Science.
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