My next paper published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta is now available online as an article ‘In Press’ here but the full edited version will be published soon. I have managed to get this paper published as Open Access which is fantastic because it means that everybody can get hold of it even if they don’t belong to a university that subscribes to the journal, or if they don’t belong to a university at all.
I have always referred to this paper as the ‘weird IDP paper’ because it discusses 2 IDPs (pieces of comet dust) that are a bit different and strange compared to all the others I’ve measured previously. One of them, called Balmoral*, contains some very heavy oxygen isotope ratios indicating that it has sampled an early Solar System reservoir only observed once before, and that was in a meteorite sample called Acfer 094. The other sample, called Lumley, is quite a large IDP and is really variable in composition across just small regions of the sample. I’ve not really seen this kind of diversity before and it indicates (or so I think) that the comet from which this particle originated was itself made up of a range of earlier comets (or primitive cometary bodies) of varied composition that were maybe formed in different locations in the early Solar System, that were disrupted and re-formed again. It just goes to show that IDPs, and comets in general have so much to show us. The problem is that the comet dust is just so small and hard to come by. Here’s hoping the Rosetta mission can shed more light on the mysteries of the early Solar System but in the meantime I’ll keep analysing my pieces of dust.
*I name my IDPs after castles (that I’ve visited) in the UK. Balmoral is the Queen’s castle in Scotland and Lumley is a castle in County Durham.