Category: 5 Cosmic Samples & Origin of the Solar System

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: While we await more discoveries and better understanding of other planetary systems, let us look again at the early history of our own solar system, after the dissipation of our dust disk. The era of giant impacts was probably confined to the…

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Until the middle 1990s, the practical study of the origin of planets focused on our single known example—the solar system. Although there had been a great deal of speculation about planets circling other stars, none had actually been detected. Logically enough, in…

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: As we have seen, the comets, asteroids, and meteorites are surviving remnants from the processes that formed the solar system. The planets, moons, and the Sun, of course, also are the products of the formation process, although the material in them has undergone a…

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Any fragment of interplanetary debris that survives its fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere is called a meteorite. Meteorites fall only very rarely in any one locality, but over the entire Earth thousands fall each year. Some meteorites are loners, but many are…

Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: As we saw in Comets and Asteroids: Debris of the Solar System, the ices in comets evaporate when they get close to the Sun, together spraying millions of tons of rock and dust into the inner solar system. There is also dust from…

Imagine you are a scientist examining a sample of rock that had fallen from space a few days earlier and you find within it some of the chemical building blocks of life. How could you determine whether those “organic” materials came from space or were merely the result of earthly contamination? We conclude our survey…