October 24, 2013

Scientists Solve Mystery of Odd Patterns of Oxygen in Solar System’s Earliest Rocks


 Cosmochemists at the University of California, San Diego, have solved a long standing mystery in the formation of the solar system: Oxygen, the most abundant element in Earth’s crust, follows a strange, anomalous pattern in the oldest, most pristine rocks, one that must result from a different chemical process than the well-understood reactions that form minerals containing oxygen on Earth.