Posted byShige Abe

July 8, 2005
Research Highlight
Characterizing the Early Solar Nebula
A recent Nature paper from Jim Lyons and Ed Young of NAI’s UCLA Lead Team postulates a cause for oxygen isotope anomalies in meteorites that overthrows a long accepted explanation. They propose CO photodissociation due to a far ultraviolet flux caused by a nearby O or B star as a mechanism to produce the isotope fractionation that is consistent with the anomalies observed in the meteorites. The postulated presence of a nearby second star (within one parsec) means statistically that the forming Solar System was probably embedded in a cluster of ~200 stars.