New NASA Grant: I-Xe Dating

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!

 

 

ALMA images of protoplanetary disks

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.