The solar system has its humble beginnings with a protoplanetary disk made up of gas and dust surrounding a then infant sun, but the mechanism that could explain how these primitive materials that eventually formed into planets have swirled into the sun at a fast rate has baffled scientists for years.
Now, a meteorite has provided evidence that intense magnetic field has something to do with the process that has helped in the formation of the solar system.
In a new study published in the journal Science on Nov. 13, researchers took a closer look at the 1 Semarkona meteorite that crashed in India in 1940. The rock belongs to a group of meteorites called Chondrites, which are pieces of asteroids that have broken off because of collisions and are considered to be among the most pristine relics of the early solar system.
For their research, Roger Fu of MIT's department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, and colleagues extracted chondrules, which are small stone grains that measure barely a millimeter in diameter, from a sample of the Semarkona rock and conducted an analysis to find out if the meteorite is indeed unaltered since it was formed. The findings reveal that it is.
"It's a very primitive meteorite, which means that since it formed about 4.5 billion years ago, not much has happened to it," Fu said. "This means it preserves the properties it had when it first formed, helping shed light on that time."
Fu and colleagues also measured the magnetic strength of these grains as well as made calculations to determine the original magnetic field in which the chondrules were created. They found the chondrules had a magnetic field of about 54 microtesla, which is about as strong as the magnetic field of the Earth and up to 100,000 times stronger than what currently exists in interstellar space.
The findings indicate the magnetic field was strong enough to play an important role in the accretion process that has helped in the formation of the solar system as the strength of the magnetic field is enough to drive gas toward the sun at a very fast rate.
Jerome Gattacceca from the European Centre for Research and Education in Environmental Sciences said that the solar system would have been different if it were not for the magnetic field.
"Without this kind of mechanism, all the matter in the solar system would have ended up in the sun, and we would not be here to discuss it," Gattacceca said. "There has to be a mechanism to prevent that. Several models exist, and this paper provides a viable mechanism, based on the existence of a significant magnetic field, to form the solar system as we know it."
