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Individuals & Families
Meteorites and the Early Solar System
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Centre:
Booked through FSC Head Office
Tutor:
Dominik Hezel
Dates:
Friday 12 March-Sunday 14 March 2010
Sole Occupancy Room:£295
Shared Room: £275
Non-Res: £206
Level:Open to Everyone Additional Course Information
Meteorites and the Early Solar System
(Abode Acrobat PDF file. To view this file you require Acrobat Reader. )
Meteorites formed 4.568 billion years ago in the protoplanetary disk around the young sun. They are the building blocks of our planets and represent a key stage in the growth from sub-millimetre fine dust grains in the interstellar medium to thousands of kilometre sized planets. Thus, the study of meteorites provide us not only with the formation conditions of our own solar system, but also with conditions that must be met by other protoplanetary systems, in order for them to form planets. This knowledge in conjunction with results from astronomical observations of protoplanetary disks enable us to predict whether a distant system is capable to form planets in the future or not.
The vast majority of meteorites originate from the asteroid belt. This is a region between Mars and Jupiter that contains more than a million bodies, the largest with a diameter of nearly 1000 km. A few meteorites come from Mars and the Moon. Although all meteorites come from within our solar system, some contain a small fraction of tiny, so called 'stardust' grains that formed in other stars or during the explosion of stars in e.g. super nova events.
The course will cover all major aspects of meteorite formation and what we learn from them about the evolution of our solar system, but also the formation and evolution of Mars and the Moon. One part will be devoted to our current knowledge about other protoplanetary disks and exo-planets.
Dominik Hezel studied mineralogy in Heidelberg and has a PhD on meteorites from Cologne. He is currently a postDoc at the Natural History Museum, studying the evolution of the early solar system using meteorites. He will be supported by others from the Museum's meteoritics research group.
