Month: December 2018

Olga Pravdivtseva was awarded a NASA grant to use the iodine-xenon radiometric chronometer to investigate the formation and alteration of components in the CK and CV carbonaceous chondrites. Olga is one of the world’s experts in this technique which provides us with exquisite time resolution to understand processes in the early Solar System. With these measurements, it is possible to constrain the timing of events that happened four billion years ago to +/-100,00 years. This is equivalent to remembering the time at which something that happened a year ago to within 15 minutes!

 

 

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) released amazing images of twenty protoplanetary disks in the early stages (first few million years) of planet formation from the Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project (DSHARP).

Our group studies these processes in our own Solar System using rocks that were around then.

This was a really cool project — measuring New Horizons’ upcoming target by stellar occultation, a sort of eclipse of another star by a distant object in our Solar System where the shadow passed over a small part of Earth. In a few weeks we’ll get to see Ultima Thule up close!

Happy Arrival at Bennu Day!