Devin Schrader from Center for Meteorite Studies at Arizona State University will be the featured speaker at an upcoming at a Department of Geoscience seminar. His talk is titled, "The retention of dust in protoplanetary disks: Evidence from agglomeratic olivine chondrules from the outer Solar System."

By investigating the in situ chemical and O-isotope compositions of olivine in lightly sintered dust agglomerates from meteorites that formed in the early Solar System, we constrain their origins and the retention of dus in the protoplanetary disk. Schrader will discuss how their morphologies indicate particle agglomeration by electrostatic charging of grains during collision, that they are remarkably similar to silicate minerals from comet 81P/Wild 2, and that our Solar System retained a dusty disk at least approximately 3.7 Ma years after the formation of the first Solar System solids.