Primitive meteorites found in Antarctica preserve traces of an ancient magnetic field that helped transform the cloud of gas and dust that gave rise to the solar system. A new investigation by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found evidence that magnetism may have played a much more important role in the formation of the solar system than previously thought.
About 4600 million years ago, the solar system was nothing more than a huge cloud of gas and dust in the process of collapsing. Over several million years, this structure known as the solar nebula flattened until it became a disk of matter, within which the Sun and planets eventually formed.
For decades, gravity was considered the main driver of this transformation. However, the new MIT study presents evidence that another phenomenon may have been fundamental in this process of solar system formation.
