The Farmville Meteorite: A Sample of the Primordial Solar Nebula (2010)
Undergraduate: Sheryl Singerling
Faculty Advisor: Allen Glazner
Department: Geology
Why is the Earth composed of certain elements? What processes contributed to its formation? Geologists have struggled with these seemingly simple questions since the origin of the field and will continue to into the future. One avenue that many scientists take to study the Earth’s formation involves the study of meteorites. Meteorites represent some of the most primitive material in the solar system. A meteorite’s classification can describe the processes that formed the material present in the solar nebula and what alterations it has experienced over time.
The purpose of this study was to classify the Farmville meteorite in hopes of understanding the processes that formed and altered it. Farmville has the following characteristics that make it fall in the H5 chondrite group: stony meteorite, presence of spheroidal grains called chondrules, high iron content, and some degree of thermal metamorphism. The following criteria were tested to determine this classification: volume percent metal, mean chondrule diameter, how similar the compositions of the mineral olivine were to one another, and the grain size of the mineral feldspar. The H5 chondrite classification tells scientists that Farmville has a composition similar to the Earth meaning it formed from similar material in the solar nebula and that it experienced a large degree of thermal alteration/heating. With continued study of chondritic meteorites, scientists may one day understand how the Earth formed.