Early solar system articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Using James Webb Space Telescope observations, spectroscopic identification of a coma of water vapour but no significant CO2 gas coma is found for the main-belt comet 238P/Read, indicating water–ice sublimation.

    • Michael S. P. Kelley
    • , Henry H. Hsieh
    •  & Heidi B. Hammel

  • Article |

    Thermodynamic modelling shows that Earth’s water, core density and overall oxidation state can be explained by the formation of Earth from planetary embryos with hydrogen-rich primary atmospheres and underlying magma oceans.

    • Edward D. Young
    • , Anat Shahar
    •  & Hilke E. Schlichting

  • Article |

    Binarity and multiplicity in general strongly affect the properties of emerging stars, as well as the physical and chemical structures of protoplanetary disks and therefore potentially any emerging planetary systems.

    • Jes K. Jørgensen
    • , Rajika L. Kuruwita
    •  & Edwin A. Bergin

  • Article |

    Dynamical simulations of the early Solar System show that the giant planets’ instability was triggered by the dispersal of the Sun’s gaseous disk, constrained by astronomical observations to be a few to ten million years after the birth of the Solar System.

    • Beibei Liu
    • , Sean N. Raymond
    •  & Seth A. Jacobson

  • Article |

    The high obliquity and low rotation period of the Kuiper belt object (2014) MU69 and other similar contact binaries is successfully reproduced from the collision and post-collision characteristics of initially wide binaries.

    • Evgeni Grishin
    • , Uri Malamud
    •  & Christoph M. Schäfer

  • Letter |

    Lunar impact simulations find an impactor-retention ratio three times lower than previously thought and indicate that highly siderophile element retention began 4.35 billion years ago, resolving accretion mass discrepancies between Earth and the Moon.

    • Meng-Hua Zhu
    • , Natalia Artemieva
    •  & Kai Wünnemann

  • Letter |

    Observations of asteroid (101955) Bennu with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reveal an unexpected surficial diversity that poses a challenge to the success of the sample-return mission.

    • D. S. Lauretta
    • , D. N. DellaGiustina
    •  & B. Marty

  • Letter |

    Halogen abundances in chondrites are 6 to 37 times lower than previously reported, which is consistent with the low abundances of these elements found in Earth.

    • Patricia L. Clay
    • , Ray Burgess
    •  & Christopher J. Ballentine

  • Letter |

    Analysis based on high-resolution observations from the Hubble Space Telescope shows that the asteroid 288P is a binary main-belt comet, with properties unlike any known binary asteroid.

    • Jessica Agarwal
    • , David Jewitt
    •  & Stephen Larson

  • Letter |

    Asteroid 2015 BZ509 is a retrograde co-orbital asteroid of the planet Jupiter, stably orbiting in a sense opposite to that of Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun for around a million years.

    • Paul Wiegert
    • , Martin Connors
    •  & Christian Veillet

  • Letter |

    The mantle signatures of elements with distinct affinities for metal isotopically record different stages of Earth’s accretion, revealing that the Moon-forming impactor had a similar composition to the other impactors that made the Earth.

    • Nicolas Dauphas

  • Letter |

    Modelling suggests that the icy region on Pluto known as Sputnik Planitia formed shortly after Charon did and has since been stable, with its latitude corresponding to a minimum in annual solar illumination and its longitude determined by tidal forces from Charon.

    • Douglas P. Hamilton
    • , S. A. Stern
    •  & H. A. Weaver

  • Letter |

    A model of the Moon’s tidal evolution, starting from the fast-spinning, high-obliquity Earth that would be expected after a giant impact, reveals that solar perturbations on the Moon’s orbit naturally produce the current lunar inclination and Earth’s low obliquity.

    • Matija Ćuk
    • , Douglas P. Hamilton
    •  & Sarah T. Stewart

  • Letter |

    Neodynium isotope data reveal that the Earth is enriched in material from red giant stars relative to its presumed meteoritic building blocks, refuting models of a hidden reservoir of 142Nd-depleted material or a ‘super-chondritic’ Earth.

    • C. Burkhardt
    • , L. E. Borg
    •  & T. Kleine

  • Letter |

    The COSIMA mass spectrometer on the Rosetta spacecraft has analysed the solid organic matter found in dust particles emitted by comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko; this matter is similar to the insoluble organic matter extracted from carbonaceous chondrites such as the Murchison meteorite, but is perhaps more primitive.

    • Nicolas Fray
    • , Anaïs Bardyn
    •  & Martin Hilchenbach

  • Letter |

    Polar hydrogen deposits on the Moon provide evidence that its spin axis has shifted; analysis of the locations of these deposits and of the lunar figure suggests that the shift occurred as a result of changes in the Moon’s moments of inertia caused by a low-density thermal anomaly beneath the Procellarum region.

    • M. A. Siegler
    • , R. S. Miller
    •  & M. J. Poston

  • Letter |

    Gravitational interactions after the Moon-forming event suggest that the current lunar inclination is the result of collisionless encounters of planetesimals with the early Moon–Earth system.

    • Kaveh Pahlevan
    •  & Alessandro Morbidelli

  • Letter |

    Gas-giant planets are widely thought to form from solid ‘cores’ of roughly ten Earth masses; simulations now show that such cores can be produced from ‘pebbles’ (centimetre-to-metre-sized objects) provided that the pebbles form sufficiently slowly, leading to the formation of one to four gas giants in agreement with the observed structure of the Solar System.

    • Harold F. Levison
    • , Katherine A. Kretke
    •  & Martin J. Duncan

  • Letter |

    The Moon is thought to have formed mainly from a giant impactor striking the Earth but it has seemed odd that the Earth and its impactor (and hence the Moon) had such similar compositions; here simulations of planetary accretion show that although the different planets have distinct compositions, the composition of each giant impactor is indeed often very similar to that of the planet it strikes.

    • Alessandra Mastrobuono-Battisti
    • , Hagai B. Perets
    •  & Sean N. Raymond

  • Letter |

    Nanomagnetic imaging has been used to obtain a palaeomagnetic time series of two pallasite meteorites, revealing that their convection was driven by core solidification, which would have caused long-lived magnetic fields in the cores of early Solar System planetary bodies.

    • James F. J. Bryson
    • , Claire I. O. Nichols
    •  & Richard J. Harrison

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