James P. Bradley

Constraints on the Formation Age of Cometary Material from the NASA Stardust Mission

Sun Stuff Comets are thought to be remnants of the Suns protoplanetary disk; hence, they hold important clues to the processes that originated the solar system. Matzel et al. (p. 483, published online 25 February) present Al-Mg isotope data on a refractory particle recovered from comet Wild 2 by the NASA Stardust mission. The lack of evidence for the extinct radiogenic isotope 26Al implies that this particle crystallized 1.7 million years after the formation of the oldest solar system solids. This observation, in turn, requires that material formed near the Sun was transported to the outer reaches of the solar system and incorporated into comets over a period of at least two million years. Transport of inner solar system material to the Kuiper Belt and incorporation into comets took at least 2 million years. We measured the 26Al-26Mg isotope systematics of a ~5-micrometer refractory particle, Coki, returned from comet 81P/Wild 2 in order to relate the time scales of formation of cometary inclusions to their meteoritic counterparts. The data show no evidence of radiogenic 26Mg and define an upper limit to the abundance of 26Al at the time of particle formation: 26Al/27Al < 1 × 10−5. The absence of 26Al indicates that Coki formed >1.7 million years after the oldest solids in the solar system, calcium- and aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs). The data suggest that high-temperature inner solar system material formed, was subsequently transferred to the Kuiper Belt, and was incorporated into comets several million years after CAI formation.

ENERGETIC PROCESSING OF INTERSTELLAR SILICATE GRAINS BY COSMIC RAYS

While a significant fraction of silicate dust in stellar winds has a crystalline structure, in the interstellar medium nearly all of it is amorphous. One possible explanation for this observation is the amorphization of crystalline silicates by relatively ‘‘low’’ energy, heavy-ion cosmic rays. Here we present the results of multiple laboratory experiments showing that single-crystal synthetic forsterite (Mg2SiO4) amorphizes when irradiated by 10 MeV Xe ions at large enoughfluences.Usingmodeling,weextrapolatetheseresultstoshowthat0.1Y5.0GeVheavy-ioncosmicrayscan rapidly (� 70 Myr) amorphize crystalline silicate grains ejected by stars into the interstellar medium. Subject headingg cosmic rays — dust, extinction Online material: color figures

PRE-ACCRETIONAL SORTING OF GRAINS IN THE OUTER SOLAR NEBULA

Despite their micrometer-scale dimensions and nanogram masses, chondritic porous interplanetary dust particles (CP IDPs) are an important class of extraterrestrial material since their properties are consistent with a cometary origin and they show no evidence of significant post-accretional parent body alteration. Consequently, they can provide information about grain accretion in the comet-forming region of the outer solar nebula. We have previously reported our comparative study of the sizes and size distributions of crystalline silicate and sulfide grains in CP IDPs, in which we found these components exhibit a size-density relationship consistent with having been sorted together prior to accretion. Here we extend our data set and include GEMS (glass with embedded metal and sulfide), the most abundant amorphous silicate phase observed in CP IDPs. We find that while the silicate and sulfide sorting trend previously observed is maintained, the GEMS size data do not exhibit any clear relationship to these crystalline components. Therefore, GEMS do not appear to have been sorted with the silicate and sulfide crystals. The disparate sorting trends observed in GEMS and the crystalline grains in CP IDPs present an interesting challenge for modeling early transport and accretion processes. They may indicate that several sorting mechanisms operated on these CP IDP components, or alternatively, they may simply be a reflection of different source environments.

Aberration Corrected and Monochromated STEM/TEM for Materials Science

1 Materials Science and Technology Division, Chemistry, Materials and Life Sciences Directorate, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA 94550, USA 2 Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of California, 1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA. 3 Micro and Interfacial Science Dept, Sandia National Labs, Livermore, CA 94550, USA 4 Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Avenue, Livermore, CA 94550 , USA. 5 University of Antwerp, EMAT Research Group, Groenenborgerlaan 171, B-2020 Antwerpen, Belgium 6 Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA