Meteorites - Relics from the early solar system

Abstract

Data on meteorite mineralogy, texture, and composition are reviewed and analyzed in order to obtain constraints on the temperatures, pressures, time-spans, and chemical environments that existed in the early solar system. It emerges that the temperature in the nebula was above 1400 K. Accretion into small bodies appears to have begun just below this temperature, when the major condensates, metal and silicate, appeared. Pressures inferred are about 0.000001 to 0.001 atm, suggesting a massive nebula with low accretion efficiency.