Chondrules, the stony, seed-like grains in meteorites, were formed when some event melted rock in the solar nebula. The latest analyses narrow the possible ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ of that process.

You and I got here by way of the stars. They fused simple elements like hydrogen and helium in their cores into more complicated ones like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and iron crucial for ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Asteroids have long been regarded as planetary building blocks. But they may actually be ...

Figure 1: Jetting of melted material during an accretionary impact. An important aspect of our model is that, although chondrules accumulate to form chondrites on small bodies, the chondrules ...

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system (so large, in fact, that some scientists think it might have even consumed other worlds), a gas giant so massive that it shaped the orbits and ...

The process that formed the giant planet Jupiter may also have spawned some of the tiniest and oldest members of our solar system -- millimeter-sized spheres called chondrules, the major part of the ...

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- The process that formed the giant planet Jupiter may also have spawned some of the tiniest and oldest members of our solar system -- millimeter-sized spheres called chondrules, ...

April 26, 1803 was an unusual day in the small town of L'Aigle in Normandy, France – it rained rocks. Over 3,000 of them fell out of the sky. Fortunately no one was injured. The French Academy of ...

A normally staid scientist has stunned many of his colleagues with his radical solution to a 135-year-old mystery in cosmochemistry. At issue is how numerous small, glassy spherules had become ...

Jupiter has a new birthday thanks to raindrops preserved in asteroids. These raindrops, known as chondrules, have allowed a team of scientists to accurately date the origin of Jupiter's formation for ...

Until now, it has been generally accepted that a meteor constitutes a time capsule – a relic of the early creation of the solar system that has fallen to Earth, allowing us to delve into the distant ...