How and When was the Solar System Created?

About 4.5 billion years ago, our Solar System formed from a vast cloud of dust and gas. The events that occurred during this time are fascinating, giving insight into not just how our part of the Universe came to be, but also the ingredients and environment necessary for other planetary systems like ours to form. How, though, can we accurately study something that happened so long ago?

The answer lies in meteorites – the rocky objects that periodically fall to Earth from the asteroid belt. Over recent decades, the ages of many meteorites have been determined. From this, a remarkable pattern has emerged – they are nearly all about the same age as our Solar System. Like extraterrestrial time capsules, they have been floating in the frozen vacuum of space ever since the Solar System formed, and studying them can help answer intriguing questions about its early days. What was the starting material, where did it come from, and what sort of process created the Solar System? How did the Earth and other planets form? How long did the whole process take?

A new Marsden grant will give Associate Professor Joel Baker and his team from Victoria University the chance to take another look at some of the meteorites that have been collected from around the world, to help answer some of these questions. Dating and analysing meteorites can often be difficult, but Associate Professor Baker has a new, high-tech laboratory that can measure the chemistry of meteorites so precisely that he can determine their age to within 0.004%, and attempt methods of analysis that have never succeeded before. 

First, they will determine the age of meteorites that were previously impossible to date to very high resolution. Then, they will measure the ratios of different elements in the meteorites. Because certain elements are produced by nuclear reactions in different types of stars, the team will be able to build a picture of what the environment was like in the emerging Solar System, and work out what type of setting is necessary for building Solar Systems like our own.

Total Funding:    $630,000
Researchers:    Associate Professor Joel Baker, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington.
Associates:    Professor Simon Turner, Macquarie University, Australia