Solar system abundance history

It includes chapters on the origin of the elements and solar system abundances, the solar nebula and planet fomiution. meteorite classitlcation. the major types of meteorites, important processes in early solar system history, geochemistry of the terrestrial planets, the giant planets and their satellites, comets, and the formation and early differentiation of the Earth. This volume is intended to be the first reference work one would consult to learn about the chemistry of the solar system. 

The investigation of which chemical elements exist in nature and in what quantities has a long history. The determination of elemental abundances in various celestial objects is still a very active field in astronomy, planetary science, and meteoritics. There are multiple motivations for studying the solar system abundances of the chemical elements. One reason to study this overall composition of the solar system is to understand how the diversity of planetary compositions, including that of our home planet, can be explained, since all planets in the solar system share a common origin from the material of the protosolar disk (the solar nebula). 

Fahey AJ, Goswami JN, McKeegan KD, Zinner EK (1987) Al, Pu, Ti, REE, and trace element abundances in hibonite grains from CM and CV meteorites. Geochim Cosmochim Acta 51 329-350 Fowler WA, Greenstein JL, Hoyle F (1962) Nucleosynthesis during the early history of the solar system. Geophys J 6 148-220... 

This chapter concerns the fields that use inorganic mass spectrometry to investigate the composition and evolution of matter in the universe and in the solar system. Cosmochemistry is related to nuclear astrophysics, because almost all the chemical elements were synthesized by nuclear reactions in the interior of stars.1 Mass spectrometric analyses of elemental composition, the distribution and variation of isotope abundances are very helpful, especially for cosmochronological studies, in order to explain the formation, history and evolution of stars in our universe and to understand the chemical and nuclear processes. 

From the isotopic decomposition of normal oxygen one finds that the mass-17 isotope, 170, is 0.038% ofallO on Earth. It is the least abundant, by a wide margin, of the three stable O isotopes, 2630 times less abundant than the most abundant of the O isotopes, namely l60. This much smaller abundance reflects the history of the Galaxy in an important way namely, it shows that17O cannot be synthesized in stars directly from H and He, as 16 O can be. Using the total abundance of elemental O = 15.2 million per million silicon atoms in solar-system matter, this isotope has... 

One can turn these arguments around, however, and use the compositions of lunar samples to define the composition of Theia, assuming the impactor produced most of the material in the Moon (MacFarlane, 1989). Accordingly, the similarity in oxygen isotopes and trace siderophile abundances between the Earth and Moon provides evidence that Earth and Theia were neighboring planets made of an identical mix of materials with similar differentiation histories (Halliday and Porcelli, 2001). Their similarities could relate to proximity in the early solar system, increasing the probability of collision. 

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