Larry Nittler provided a “Perspectives” piece for the 7 May issue of Science, entitled “Cometary Dust in the Laboratory,” that comments on recent research results on the early solar system obtained by American and French research teams. Both teams took advantage of the availability of relatively less studied primitive materials returned by the Stardust mission to comet Wild 2 and from Antarctic micrometeorites. Click here to read Nittler’s commentary.

Image: University of Manchester.

Former postdoctoral fellow Maria Schönbächler (now at the University of Manchester) and co-authors Rick Carlson, Mary Horan, Tim Mock, and Erik Hauri, recently published a study in Science indicating that water and other key volatiles may have been present in at least some of Earth’s original building blocks, rather than acquired later from comets, as some scientists have suggested. Tiny variations in the isotopic composition of silver in meteorites and terrestrial rocks are helping scientists put together a timetable of how our planet was assembled beginning 4.568 billion years ago. For more information on this research, see the CIW press release.