When did the Sun Blow Away the Solar Nebula? - by spacewriter
While all that was happening, the cloud was in motion and flattening out like a pancake. Think of it like an accretion disk feeding material into the center where the star was forming. Not only was it filled with the seeds of planets, but it was also threaded with a magnetic field. This active disk is where the planets formed. They started out as clumps of dust, which stuck to each other to become pebble-sized rocks.
A team of scientists, led by Cauê S. Borlina of Johns Hopkins University and MIT, wondered if the system cleared out all at once. Or, did it happen over two separate timescales? To answer that, the team turned to a characteristic called “solar nebula paleomagnetism”. That’s a fancy way of saying that there was a magnetic field in the nebula. Meteoroids formed in the nebula at that time contain imprints of that field.
The rocks that formed in the nebula should show a magnetic imprint reflecting the magnetic fields at the time. Those formed after the nebula cleared wouldn’t show much magnetic fingerprint. They would record the magnetism of that time and place.Borlina’s team studied meteorites found in Antarctica in late 1977/78 and 2008. Those rocks are made of a primordial material called “carbonaceous chondrite” that formed early in solar system history. The team focused on magnetite found in each sample.
The further analysis gave a time frame for clearing the inner and outer solar system. For the inner region—1-3 AU, from roughly the orbit of Earth to the outer limit of the Asteroid Belt—the team found the nebula dissipation happened about 3.7 million years after the formation of the solar system. The outer solar system took another 1.5 million years to clear.
That squares with the earlier estimate of around 4 million years for the complete sweep. The next step will be to get more precise ages from meteorites in general. That should help scientists put some more definite constraints on the actual dissipation timeline. In particular, the team wants to conduct more experimental work on magnetite samples in different families of these chondrites. That will let them figure out exactly when the rocks acquired the imprints of magnetic fields.
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