Meteorites hold dust from stars that died before the Sun was born, and researchers at the University of Manchester plan to extract and analyse those ancient grains to reconstruct the Solar System’s origin story. The problem is that we do not know exactly how a cloud of gas and dust collapsed to form the Sun and planets, or whether a nearby supernova triggered the event. Radioactive iron atoms, which are forged only in supernovae, could settle the question if their abundance in early Solar System material can be measured precisely. The team will also use rapidly decaying radioactive elements as clocks to date the sequence of events that built asteroids and planets, and study Martian meteorites to understand how Mars separated into a metal core and rocky mantle—a process that on Earth created conditions suitable for life. Moon meteorites will reveal how long lunar volcanoes flowed and how impacts battered the surface. This is fundamental science with no immediate practical application. It answers how planetary systems form and evolve, knowledge that underpins our understanding of Earth’s own history. The project also includes building a new instrument capable of analysing just a few hundred atoms of the rare gas krypton, a technical advance that could eventually find uses in other fields requiring extreme sensitivity.
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We're all familiar with the solar system, but how did it come to be the way it is today? We believe the story started with a cloud of dust and gas, much like those we can observe elsewhere in the galaxy today. We plan to examine some samples of this dust that were preserved in meteorites and try to learn about the stars they came from and what happened to them in the cloud from which the solar sytem formed. We also plan to study dust entering the solar system today so we can compare it with dust from 4.5 billion years ago. This will tell us how the galaxy has changed over time. The first stage in the formation of the solar system was the collapse of the cloud into a disk that fed material into a central star. There is speculation that a supernova either caused the collapse or happened at around this time. To help find out if this is true, we will try to find how much radioactive iron was present (atoms of radioactive iron are made in supernovae along with a lot of other stable and unstable atoms). Other radioactive elements were present in the early solar system. Some decayed so rapidly that none of them were left after 100Ma, but we want to use the traces they left behind to figure out the sequence of events that led to the planets and asteroids of today's solar system Eventually sizable bodies formed that, like the Earth, were big enough to separate into iron cores and stony mantles. We want to use martian meteorites to see how this happened on the planet Mars. We can compare this with the similar processes on the Earth that allowed life to form and evolve. We're especially interested how volatile elements that tend to end up in a planet's atmosphere or oceans behaved early in the history of Mars. We're also planning to study meteorites from the Moon so that we can see how long volcanoes continued to pore lava onto its surface and how its surface was broken up by meteorite impacts. All of these projects rely on special scientific instruments and techniques that we have developed. As part of this project we plan to develop a new generation of instruments that will allow us to get information from a few hundred atoms of the rare gas krypton.
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