A meteorite delivered diamonds carrying traces of our solar system’s less successful protoplanets
Building a planet out of dust isn’t easy. Sure, the recipe basically requires innate forces like gravity to do a lot of the work, but not every clump of debris successfully forms into a durable planet. Those first steps are called protoplanets, and while we’ve seen them around other stars, we’ve only recently found evidence of the protoplanets that helped build the planets in our own solar system.
Learning from dirty diamonds
The evidence found in diamonds carried to Earth in a meteorite that struck the Earth in 2008. Those diamonds carried small bits of other metals and minerals that were present when the diamond was formed. The composition and structure of this extra material, known as inclusions, can tell us a lot about the conditions that created the diamond.
In this case, the structure of the diamond indicates that it was formed as an achondrite— a rock formed in an object large and hot enough to create a metallic core inside a layer of rock. That could include very large asteroids, but other features of these diamonds make it more likely to have been formed in a larger protoplanet instead. The inclusions also show that these diamonds were formed under at least 20 gigapascals of pressure, well beyond diamond’s normal elastic breaking point. With that reference point, geophysicists can estimate that the protoplanet that created these diamonds was somewhere between the size of Mercury and Mars.
This may seem like a crazy amount of information to infer from a single space rock, but we’ve been reading history from diamonds here on Earth for years. Actually, we’ve been getting history out of the Earth, as diamonds are known to carry information about the formation and movement of materials deep under the Earth’s crust, carrying them to the surface like shiny time-capsules, including deposits of water over a 100 miles below the Earth’s surface.
Potential planets from the past
None of this suggests that we have a new planet forming next door. Simulations of our solar system’s formation predicted that multiple protoplanets formed within 10 million years of our Sun’s formation. While at least eight of those objects managed to survive long enough to become the planets we know today, the diamonds found in the 2008 meteorite are probably just pieces of some of the other protoplanets that were destroyed in collisions in a more crowded solar system.
Source: Diamonds in Meteorite May Hail from Our Ancient Solar System by Doris Elin Slazar, Space.com
