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的样子的呢？我们相信这个故事始于一团尘埃和气体云，就像我们今天在银河系其他地方观察到的那样。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的恒星，以及它们在形成太阳系的云中发生了什么。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时间变化的。太阳系形成的第一阶段是星云坍缩成一个圆盘，为中心恒星提供物质。有人猜测，要么是一颗超新星导致了坍缩，要么是在这个时候发生的。为了弄清这是否属实，我们将试图找出有多少放射性铁存在（放射性铁原子是在超新星中与许多其他稳定和不稳定的原子一起形成的）。其他放射性元素在早期太阳系中也存在。有些衰变得非常快，在100毫安之后就没有了，但我们想利用它们留下的痕迹，找出导致今天太阳系行星和小行星形成的一系列事件，最终形成了像地球一样大的天体，大到足以分裂成铁芯和石质地幔。我们想用火星陨石来看看这在火星上是如何发生的。我们可以将其与地球上允许生命形成和进化的类似过程进行比较。我们特别感兴趣的是，在火星早期的历史中，挥发性元素在行星大气或海洋中的表现。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渗透熔岩有多长时间，以及月球表面是如何被陨石撞击破坏的。所有这些项目都依赖于我们开发的特殊科学仪器和技术。作为这个项目的一部分，我们计划开发新一代的仪器，使我们能够从几百个稀有气体氪原子中获取信息。

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.