From the start, the solar system chose fire over ice to build its first bodies

When the solar system first took up the task of building solid bodies — such as planets, moons, and protoplanets — it basically had a choice between two ingredients. There were heat-forged chondrules, which were millimeter-sized bits of rock; and there was matrix, a fine-grained, cold dust loaded with water ice and organic molecules.

And from the get-go, the solar system chose fire.

In a new, Yale-led study, researchers provide the first geochemical evidence that within the first million years after the solar system began to form, it was already preferentially sorting for chondrules over matrix. Prior research had only been able to document this sorting process in objects that formed 2 to 4 million years after the solar system’s origin. more…