The Ed Scott Lecture Series is a tribute to Ed Scott who died in 2021. It is comprised of online lectures, each dealing with developments in a particular field of meteorite studies. The lectures will be presented for a general scientific audience so that members of the Meteoritical Society can learn about questions that drive research in areas outside their own. The series is supported by a donation from Ed’s family.
The Ed Scott Lecture Series is organized through the Membership Committee.
Connection information is provided to MetSoc members via email. Lectures are recorded and made publicly available here:
Upcoming Lecture:
Thursday 26th February at 8 pm (UTC)
Chondrules and their importance in the early Solar System
Professor Rhian Jones, University of Manchester
Brief overview: Chondrules are millimetre-sized beads of rock that are common constituents of most chondrite meteorites. Their origins have been puzzling meteorite researchers for over 150 years. We know that chondrules formed in the earliest stages of Solar System history, in the presence of the protoplanetary disk. We also know that they formed in short heating events that produced large numbers of melt droplets, which then cooled quickly to form the solid chondrules we find in meteorites today. Chondrules are ubiquitous in chondrites that formed in both the inner and outer parts of the disk, although perhaps not in the furthest cold reaches of the dust cloud. Since it is likely that a large proportion of the disk’s dust was processed through chondrule-forming events, it is also likely that chondrules were an important building-block of rocky bodies, including asteroids, moons and planets. A fundamental problem is that we do not know the mechanism that heated chondrules, although many different possibilities have been suggested. The most plausible current explanation is that they were heated in shock fronts that passed through the disk, while impact events could also have been responsible. In this talk I will summarize some of the properties of chondrules that help us understand this important early stage of Solar System evolution and examine some of the outstanding questions that still evade explanations.
About the presenter: Rhian Jones is Professor of Cosmochemistry in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research on meteorites focusses on the origin and early evolution of the Solar System, through studies of the petrology and geochemistry of chondritic meteorites. Following an undergraduate degree in Chemistry, Rhian did a PhD in Geology at the University of Manchester. She then spent many years studying meteorites at the University of New Mexico, including a term as Curator of the meteorite collection in the Institute of Meteoritics. Rhian currently works at the University of Manchester, studying meteorites and cooking up experimental analogues. She has served the Meteoritical Society as Treasurer and as Chair of the Endowment Committee. Asteroid 5366 Rhianjones is named after her.