The early solar system was a wild, world-destroying place.
| In 2008, a rock laced with tiny diamonds hurtled through miles of thickening nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide, its exterior heating up as it raced through the thick air. A telescope tracked its progress, watching as the asteroid-turned-meteor | By Mary Beth Griggs Popular Science 4-16-18 |
The explosion and crash were just the latest of eons of indignities, from a high pressure beginning in a promising planetary start up, to a cataclysmic failure, to billions of years of aimless wandering around the solar system.
A new study published in Nature Communications today offers a dramatic origin story for the meteorite. Based on materials found inside the diamonds nestled within, researchers think this may be the remnant of a long-lost planet or planetary embryo; one that was still in its infancy when the chaos of the early solar system obliterated it.
