Solar System Forensics - No Explosion In Earth's Creation, Just Symmetry

A strange mix of oxygen found in a stony meteorite that exploded February 8, 1969 over Pueblito de Allende, Mexico has puzzled scientists ever since. Small flecks of minerals lodged in the stone and thought to date from the beginning of the solar system have a pattern of oxygen types, or isotopes, that differs from those found in all known planetary rocks, including those from Earth, its Moon and meteorites from Mars. Now scientists from UC San Diego and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have eliminated one model proposed to explain the anomaly: the idea that light from the early Sun could have shifted the balance of oxygen isotopes in molecules that formed after it turned on. When they beamed light through carbon monoxide gas to form carbon dioxide, the balance of oxygen isotopes in the new molecules failed to shift in ways predicted by the model they report in the September 5 issue of Science. Read More...

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