The ancient Semarkona meteorite that researchers discovered in India during the 1940s is giving scientists an explanation of how our solar system was created by magnetic fields, Science Recorder reported.
The planets of the solar system were formed by a rotating protoplanetary disks of gas and dust that swirled around the sun billions of years ago, with some of the disks spiraling into the sun. Scientists have yet to find an explanation as to how the disks ended up swirling around the sun.
After studying the Semarkona meteorite, however, scientists theorize that it was due to a magnetic field present in meteorites.
The Semarkona meteorite is considered a primitive meteorite , with it being formed 4.5 billion years ago, and has undergone very few tests, preserving most of its properties from when it was first formed, according to Scientific America.
The meteorite is also made up of small pellets of molten lava, called chondrules, that were cooled in space and contained iron-bearing minerals known as dusty olivine crystals. If these crystals were cooling in the presence of magnetic fields, the strength of these magnetic properties could have been recorded in the crystal.
"Most other meteorites were altered in some way that would remove their original magnetization - maybe they were heated, or water flowed through them, or they experienced high pressure from impacts," said Roger Fu, the lead study author and planetary scientist at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Semarkona is one of the few meteorites we know of that avoided all of these things."
Fu said that studying the magnetic properties would be difficult as the pellets are only one-fiftieth of an inch wide, or five times wider than the width of human hair, and most magnetic signatures are weak, hard to detect and would require the use of a superconducting quantum interference device.
Their team, however, has managed to discover that the pellets were magnetized in a field that was 100,000 times stronger than the current magnetic field present in interstellar space, Tech Times claimed.
The magnetic field in the meteorite was recorded to have a strength of 54 microtesla, which is about as strong as Earth's magnetic field.
"The magnetic field that we measure is extremely strong - 100,000 times stronger than what's in interplanetary space today. It's hard to imagine it didn't play a major role in mass and angular momentum transfer," said Benjamin Weiss, the supervisor of the study.
Meredith Hughes, an astronomer of the Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, said that the discovery affirms to scientists that magnetic fields could exist large enough to be affect the formation of the solar system.
"We had guessed that, but we had no evidence of that until now," Hughes said.
