Tiny Molten Droplets, Dusty Clouds, and Planet Formation

Chondrules, millimeter-sized spherules that formed as rapidly-cooled molten droplets, are characteristic of chondrite meteorites. If they formed at low pressure in the solar nebula (the cloud of gas and dust surrounding the infant Sun and from which the planets formed), then they should have lost almost all their inventories of volatile elements, such as sodium, because volatile elements would have boiled off the chondrules when they were molten. Conel Alexander (Carnegie Institution of Washington) and colleagues at Carnegie, the U.S. Geological Survey (Reston), and the American Museum of Natural History (New York) show that there was little sodium loss. They measured the sodium concentrations in numerous crystals of olivine inside chondrules in the Semarkona meteorite. The results show that the variations in concentrations from the centers of crystals to their edges are consistent with crystallization in a molten droplet that was not losing sodium to the surrounding gas. These results are supported by independent measurements by Alexander Borisov (Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow) and colleagues at the University of Hannover, Georg-August-University Göettingen, and Köln University, all in Germany. Sodium loss could have been suppressed if the gas surrounding each chondrule had a much higher pressure of sodium than that expected for the solar nebula. Such a high pressure of sodium is most easily explained if chondrules formed in a region with a high density of solids. Alexander and his co-workers argue that such dense regions could have enough mass in a small space to collapse by gravity, perhaps forming planetesimals, the first step in constructing the inner planets.