Investigating the Early Solar System with Isotope Cosmochemistry - Manchester Cosmochemistry Rolling Grant

我们都熟悉太阳系，但它是如何变成今天这样的呢？我们相信这个故事是从尘埃和气体云开始的，就像我们今天在银河系其他地方可以观察到的那样。我们计划检查一些保存在陨石中的尘埃样本，并试图了解它们来自哪些恒星，以及它们在形成太阳系的云层中发生了什么。我们还计划研究今天进入太阳系的尘埃，这样我们就可以将它与45亿年前的尘埃进行比较。这将告诉我们银河系是如何随着时间的推移而变化的。太阳系形成的第一个阶段是云层坍塌成圆盘，将物质送入中央恒星。有猜测认为，要么是超新星导致了坍塌，要么就发生在这个时候。为了帮助查明这是否属实，我们将试图找出存在多少放射性铁(放射性铁的原子与许多其他稳定和不稳定的原子一起在超新星中形成)。其他放射性元素也存在于早期太阳系中。其中一些衰变得如此之快，以至于在100 Ma之后没有一个留下，但我们想利用它们留下的痕迹来弄清楚导致今天太阳系行星和小行星最终形成的相当大的天体的事件序列，这些天体和地球一样，大到足以分离成铁核和石质地幔。我们想用火星陨石来观察火星上是如何发生这种情况的。我们可以将这与地球上允许生命形成和进化的类似过程进行比较。我们尤其感兴趣的是，在火星历史的早期，易挥发元素在火星大气层或海洋中的行为。我们还计划研究来自月球的陨石，这样我们就可以看到火山在月球表面持续穿孔熔岩多长时间，以及它的表面是如何被陨石撞击打碎的。所有这些项目都依赖于我们开发的特殊科学仪器和技术。作为该项目的一部分，我们计划开发新一代仪器，使我们能够从稀有气体氪的数百个原子中获取信息。

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.