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Updated: Jun 23, 2026

Laboratory Drop Towers for the Experimental Simulation of Dust-aggregate Collisions in the Early Solar System
Published on: June 5, 2014
Origin of nucleosynthetic isotope heterogeneity in the solar protoplanetary disk
Anne Trinquier1, Tim Elliott, David Ulfbeck
1Center for Stars and Planets, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen DK-1350, Denmark.
Abstract:
Stable-isotope variations exist among inner solar system solids, planets, and asteroids, but their importance is not understood. We report correlated, mass-independent variations of titanium-46 and titanium-50 in bulk analyses of these materials. Because titanium-46 and titanium-50 have different nucleosynthetic origins, this correlation suggests that the presolar dust inherited from the protosolar molecular cloud was well mixed when the oldest solar system solids formed, but requires a subsequent process imparting isotopic variability at the planetary scale. We infer that thermal processing of molecular cloud material, probably associated with volatile-element depletions in the inner solar system, resulted in selective destruction of thermally unstable, isotopically anomalous presolar components, producing residual isotopic heterogeneity. This implies that terrestrial planets accreted from thermally processed solids with nonsolar isotopic compositions.
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