Scientists confirm our infant Solar System is shaped like a doughnut

Four and a half billion years ago, our solar system was a swirling cloud of gas and dust around the sun, known as a protoplanetary disk.

This cosmic nursery eventually condensed to form asteroids and planets. While astronomers can observe protoplanetary disks around distant stars, it is impossible to see what our own solar system looked like in its infancy. However, meteorites that have fallen to Earth provide valuable clues about the early solar system.

These metals, such as iridium and platinum, typically condense at high temperatures and were expected to form close to the sun. Surprisingly, the study found that these metals were more abundant in meteorites from the outer disk, which was colder and farther from the sun.

The researchers proposed that the early solar disk did not have a ring structure like those observed around other stars, such as HL Tau. Instead, it resembled a doughnut, allowing metal grains to migrate from the inner to the outer disk as it expanded. This migration posed a puzzle: gravity should have pulled these metals back into the sun.

The team suggested that the formation of Jupiter created a gap in the disk, trapping the metals in the outer regions and preventing their inward migration.

"Once Jupiter formed, it very likely opened a physical gap that trapped the iridium and platinum metals in the outer disk and prevented them from falling into the sun,"

explained Bidong Zhang, a UCLA planetary scientist and the study's first author. "These metals were later incorporated into asteroids that formed in the outer disk. This explains why meteorites formed in the outer disk have much higher iridium and platinum contents than their inner-disk peers."

The study also highlighted the role of iron meteorites, which contain molybdenum isotopes pointing to various locations across the protoplanetary disk. These meteorites, older than any other rocks in the solar system, provide insights into the chemical composition of the early disk.

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