Tim Elliott
School of Earth Science, University of Bristol, Queen’s Road, Clifton BS8 1RJ, UK.
As in many building booms, planets were put together pretty rapidly. Transforming nebular dust to fully formed planets took less than ~100 million years of the ~4.5 billion years of solar system history. Accurate determination of the rates of planetary growth is key for understanding these tumultuous beginnings of the solar system, but obtaining high-precision ages on short-lived events that happened so long ago is a formidable challenge. On page 1150 of this issue, Kruijer et al. (1) determine with remarkable accuracy that planetary core formation began less than 1 million years after the first solids condensed—extraordinarily fast on geological time scales.
Reference
Elliot T (in press) Speed metal. Science 344:1086.
[doi:10.1126/science.1254943]
Reprinted with permission from AAAS
Cosmochemistry Papers 