March 03, 2017
Postdoctoral scholar Mohit Melwani Daswani, Associate Professor (part time) Phillipp Heck, and former postdoctoral scholar Nicolas Greber analyzed a newly discovered meteorite, discovered in Northwest Africa. Oxygen isotope analyses to aid in its classification were performed at the Open University (UK). The meteorite has now been officially named Northwest Africa (NWA) 11115. The analyses show that NWA 11115 is from Mars. Specifically, it is a shergottite, and is most likely a sample of either the Tharsis volcanic province or the adjacent Amazonis-Elysium lava plains. CT scans of the meteorite can now be viewed at the Field Museum of Natural History. While NWA 11115 is petrographically and compositionally similar to other martian basaltic and martian olivine-phyric meteorites, it is geochemically distinct from other martian meteorites and from the surface of Mars, because of its anomalously low potassium to thorium (K/Th) ratio. The investigation into the cause of this anomaly is ongoing.
February 20, 2017
Louis Block Professor Nicolas Dauphas was a coauthor on a new paper in Nature Geosciences on Earth's iron fractionation. Earth has a significantly elevated level of Iron-56 relative to the chrondritic meteorites it was presuably built from. One theory was that this was due to fractionation during core-mantle segregation. Nicolas was part of a team that showed experimentally that the conditions relevant for core-mantle separation do not cause the observed fractionation, so there must be some other explanation for it.
February 14, 2017
Postdoctoral scholar Sebastiaan Krijt has won a prestigious three-year Hubble Fellowship, which are awarded to only 5% of applicants. Sebastiaan will work with associate professor Fred Ciesla and collaborators to explore the fate of carbon-bearing molecules during the earliest stages of planet formation. Congratulations, Sebastiaan!