Sarah Stewart, professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Davis, is the featured speaker at an upcoming Department of Physics and Astronomy colloquium. Her talk is titled, "The Rosetta Stones of Planet Formation: Linking Meteorites to Giant Planets"

Meteorites are time capsules of planet formation. The most abundant meteorites types originate from primitive bodies that never heated to the point of differentiation and contain chondrules, which were transiently molten silicate spherules. These primitive planetesimals formed contemporaneously with planets over the first few million years of the solar system. The physical processes that formed chondrules and assembled them into planetesimals is one of the biggest unsolved problems in planetary science. Stewart will present a new physical model for the formation of chondrules and planetesimals that links their origin to the dynamical excitation by the giant planets. She proposes that the uncertain history of our giant planets, their formation locations and migration distances, was recorded by planetesimals and preserved in the asteroid belt. Meteorites are the Rosetta stones of planet formation that can translate the history of plantesimals to the history of the giant planets.

There will be refreshements starting at 3:30 p.m.