From Earth to the moon to Mars, the rocky structures of celestial bodies were built using the very same mixture of oxygen. But for 40 years now, researchers have been noticing something strange: meteorites from the early days of the Solar System are built with a different mixture of oxygen, one where an isotope of the element appeared far more frequently than it ought to. "It’s a big problem," cosmochemist Subrata Chakraborty tells The Verge. "It’s a really, really big problem. If you don’t understand the oxygen isotope, you don’t understand the formation and evolution of the solar system."
"It's a really, really big problem."
In a paper published today in Science , researchers from UC San Diego, led by Chakraborty, are finally...
via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/24/5024678/puzzling-oxygen-anomaly-from-early-solar-system-solved
No comments:
Post a Comment