Arsenic in the Sun, Moon, and planets

4 Arsenic chemistry of the solar system 3.4.1 Arsenic in the Sun, Moon, and planets 

Debris from earlier supemova(s) condensed into the Solar Nebula about 6 billion years ago (Faure, 1998, 22). By about 4.5 billion years ago, the planets had largely condensed from the nebula and the core of the Sun became dense enough to ignite through fusion Reaction 3.1. Based on the chemistry of chondrite meteorites (Wasson and Kallemeyn, 1988, 536), the original Solar Nebula had about 6.79 arsenic atoms for every one million atoms of silicon (Table 3.1) and 2.72 x 1010 atoms of hydrogen (Faure, 1998 Anders and Ebihara, 1982, 15). 

Information on the current arsenic content of the solar system is largely limited to spectrographic analyses of the Sun, Saturn, and Jupiter measurements on available Moon rocks and meteorites and analyses of terrestrial materials. Spectrographic analyses indicate that the arsenic concentration of the Sun is about 0.004 mg kg-1 (Matschullat, 2000, 299 Table 3.1). Arsenic is moderately volatile in the vacuum of space (McDonough, 2004, 555) and should be preferentially concentrated on Jupiter and other planets 

Source Average number of arsenic atoms per 106 silicon atoms ( 1 SD) Average arsenic concentration (mg kg-1) Reference(s) 

No rock samples have been collected from Mercury and Venus, and the arsenic chemistry of their crusts is unknown. Like the Moon, the crustal rocks on Mercury, Venus, and Mars are primarily basalts and other mafic rocks. If the trace element chemistry of their basalts is similar to lunar specimens, they should contain 1 mg kg-1 of arsenic. 

---