Nicholas Dygert, the Larry and Dawn Taylor Assistant Professor of Planetary Geosciences in the UT Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, will present “Going to Pieces: Catastrophic Collisions in the Early Solar System,” Friday, March 26 via Zoom.

Meteorites recovered on Earth originate from at least three parent bodies located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. In his presentation, Professor Dygert will discuss how the application of a novel geochemical technique to ordinary chondrites – the most abundant class of meteorites – revealed that they were rapidly cooled from temperatures of about 1,000°C shortly after the Solar System formed. The only plausible mechanism for producing such rapid cooling is catastrophic fragmentation of their parent asteroids after collisional events, suggesting such collisions were frequent in the young Solar System.