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A piece of Mars that fell to Earth more than 2 centuries ago is telling planetary scientists a little about how the Red Planet was born. A recent analysis of the meteorite showed that volatile elements in the planet’s interior were deposited by primitive meteorites, whereas those in the atmosphere were accreted from the last wisps of the solar nebula—the cloud of gas and dust that gave birth to the Sun.
“What we found is just the opposite of more classic models,” said Sujoy Mukhopadhyay, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and coauthor of the new study. “They start with solar gases in the interior and add the chondritic gases later on, toward the end of planet formation.”
Mukhopadhyay and lead author Sandrine Péron, currently a fellow at ETH Zürich, used new analytic techniques to parse the relative abundances of krypton isotopes contained in tiny bubbles in the Chassigny meteorite, which fell in northeastern France in 1815.