This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Around 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was little more than a giant ball of gas and dust. Over the next few million years, this "solar nebula" underwent a huge transformation, flattening into a disk of matter that then condensed to form the central sun and orbiting planets.
Scientists have assumed that the early solar system was shaped mainly through gravity. But a new study finds that magnetism also likely played a role. MIT scientists have discovered records of ancient magnetism in the oldest known meteorite samples.
The team analyzed microscopic grains embedded in a meteorite discovered in Antarctica in 2008. These grains, called calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, or CAIs, originally formed during the solar system's first 200,000 years, making the samples the oldest known solar system material. The findings suggest that a magnetic field existed very early on, during the time of the solar nebula.
The researchers estimate that this nebular magnetic field was stronger than Earth's magnetic field today and likely played a significant role in pulling together primordial matter to form the early sun. "This transition, from a spherical cloud to a protoplanetary disk, is one of the most significant events in all of solar system history," says Benjamin Weiss, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT.
"It has long been theorized that gravity caused this, but our measurements show magnetism likely played a role." Weiss and his colleagues report their discovery in a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study's MIT co-authors are first author Cauê Borlina Ph.D. '22, Elias Mansbach Ph.D. '24, and Nilanjan Chatterjee, along with Xue-Ning Bai of Tsinghua University, Po-Yen Tung and Richard Harrison of Cambridge University, François Tissot of Caltech, and Kevin McKeegan of the University of California at Los Angeles. Magnetic fields are generated by matter that is electrically charged and moving around.
In the very early solar system, the collapsing cloud of gas and dust could have whipped up a plasma of charged particles. As these charges spun through the developing disk, they could have produced and sustained a magnetic field. If this were the case, Weiss and his colleagues reasoned that such early magnetism would have affected material in the disk.
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