![]() ![]() ![]() “This particular meteorite, Chassigny, is the only one from the noble gas point-of-view that can give access to the Martian interior composition,” she added. Krypton is challenging to measure, so we developed a new protocol to be able to measure precisely those isotopes in the meteorite.” With this in mind, she and Mukhopadhyay obtained “the first precise measurements of krypton in this meteorite. “Krypton is very useful among the different noble gasses because the krypton isotope composition of different potential sources like the Sun or the interior of planets is very distinct,” said Péron. Krypton was ideal because its isotopes, which are different atomic configurations of an element, are imprinted with information about the sources of volatiles. To extract the secrets of this ancient history, Péron and study co-author Sujoy Mukhopadhyay, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis, used krypton as a tracer. We can't have this kind of information for the Earth, because the Earth took much longer, between 50 to 100 million years, to form and so Mars’ composition really is an insight into what was happening in the solar system very early on.” “When we study Mars’ interior composition, we can have an idea of what processes form the terrestrial planets very early on during the solar system’s formation. “We know that Mars formed very quickly,” said Péron in a call, noting that the planet took just four million years to form. Led by Sadrine Péron, a postdoctoral scholar at ETH Zürich in Switzerland, the new research is built on unprecedented measurements of krypton, an inert noble gas, inside the Chassigny meteorite, an extremely unusual rock that represents the interior of Mars, opening a rare window into the initial stages of planetary formation in the solar system. Now, a pair of researchers have upended the conventional view of how Mars evolved with precise observations that “contradict the common hypothesis that, during planet formation, chondritic volatile delivery occurred after solar gas acquisition,” according to a study published on Thursday in Nature. Later, the thinking goes, primitive asteroids supply more volatiles by crashing into planets while they are still molten, a process that enriches the young worlds with distinctive meteorites known as chondrites. Most models suggest that gasses from these nebulas deliver an initial dose of volatiles to embryonic planets. ![]() Volatile elements, so named because they are easily vaporized, are present in the nebulas from which star systems are born. ![]()
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