The Great Meteorite Mystery!
For the past fifty years, scientists who study meteorites have been attempting to solve a mystery concerning the origin of chondrules which are tiny millimeter-size glassy droplets of once-molten rock that meteoriticist Henry Sorby described as "drops of fiery rain" in 1877. These mysterious little droplets are seen in 85% of the meteorites that shower down upon our planet. Solving this great meteorite mystery is difficult, because chondrule formation has not been observed in modern times--the right conditions for their formation probably have not existed for over 4.5 billion years in our Solar System, when a primordial disk of dust and gas (called a protoplanetary disk) circled our newborn Sun. In July 2013, scientists suggested that they may have discovered the strange origin of these my...