The first bodies to form in the Solar System acquired their materials from stars, the presolar molecular cloud and the protoplanetary disk.
Nitrogen-containing organic compounds play key biological roles, and their identification in primitive astromaterials such as meteorites can shed light on the origin of life.
A key question in astronomy is how ubiquitous Earth-like rocky planets are. The formation of terrestrial planets in our solar system was strongly influenced by the radioactive decay heat of […]
![a) Mn/Na vs. Mn/Mg and b) Mn/Na vs. K/Li ratios among planetary bodies. The coloured curves denote the evolution of the composition of an evaporation residue calculated using eq. 35 at 1100 K (purple), 1500 K (blue), 2000 K (green) and 2500 K (red) at a fixed relative oxygen fugacity (∆IW-1, except for 1100 K, which was calculated at ∆IW-6, see text), with numbers denoting the fraction of Mn loss undergone by the body. The black dashed lines connect equal degrees of Mn loss at different temperatures. The solid black curves trace a binary mixture of a volatile-depleted end-member with 90 % Mn loss and a CI-like end-member. The small numbers denote the mass fraction of CI in the mixture. On a), only the volatile-depleted end-member at 1500 K is shown due to clarity, whereas in b) the end-members are taken at the three temperatures, and the dotted grey lines connect equal fractions of CI material. The grey point gives the composition of the Earth assuming 50 % of its Mn budget resides in the core [see Siebert et al., 2018]. The grey field denotes the compositional range of chondrites [Wasson and Kallemeyn, 1988; Siebert et al., 2018]. -- astro-ph.EP](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Physicochemical-Controls-On-The.png?resize=1200%2C718&ssl=1)
Despite the fact that the terrestrial planets formed from the protoplanetary disk, their compositions show marked departures from that of solar nebula condensates.
The Extraterrestrial Materials Academy (ETMA) is scheduled for June 8–August 15, 2026, at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) in Houston, Texas, in partnership with the University of Houston–Clear Lake […]
Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter – Volume 48 No. 2 November 2025
The asteroid Bennu continues to provide new clues to scientists’ biggest questions about the formation of the early solar system and the origins of life.
Rocks that stood out as light-colored dots on the reddish-orange surface of Mars now are the latest evidence that areas of the small planet may have once supported wet oases […]
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission characterized the asteroid Bennu and delivered pristine samples of its regolith to Earth.
A machine learning framework can distinguish molecules made by biological processes from those formed through non-biological processes and could be used to analyze samples returned by current and future planetary […]
