Given that our species has only existed for a tiny fraction of the lifespan of our solar system, where understanding the huge planetary expanse around us is concerned, humans have a lot of catching up to do.

And with every new discovery, our scientists come fractionally closer to understanding not only how our solar system formed, but what exactly has happened in it in the 4.6 billion years since.

So it’s exciting news every time scientists meticulously piece together another fact about our solar system – and scientists in Japan and Italy have recently done just that.

Aiming to deepen understanding of our solar system’s largest gas giant Jupiter, the researchers from Nagoya University in Japan and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics studied the composition of meteorites that were born at the explosive moment of Jupiter’s formation.

As detailed in their paper in the journal Scientific Reports, Jupiter’s powerful birth and growth caused planetesimals (asteroid-like rock and ice balls) to leave their existing orbits, which made them collide into one another.

These violent collisions caused the planetesimals to melt into droplets known as chondrules, which are now found inside our present-day meteorites.

And by examining and dating these chondrules, the researchers explain, we can understand more about how Jupiter – and other planets within our solar system – were born and developed through time, something that Professor Sin-iti Sirono explained in a statement:

“When planetesimals collided with each other, water instantly vaporized into expanding steam. This acted like tiny explosions and broke apart the molten silicate rock into the tiny droplets we see in meteorites today. Previous formation theories couldn’t explain chondrule characteristics without requiring very specific conditions, while this model requires conditions that naturally occurred in the early solar system when Jupiter was born.”

Prior to this research, chondrules had been something of a mystery, with everything from their spherical shape to their composition baffling reserachers.

Using pioneering methods, the researchers used their observations from the chondrules, along with computer simulations of Jupiter’s birth and growth trajectories, to understand how the planetesimals collided, as Dr. Diego Turrini continued:

“We compared the characteristics and abundance of simulated chondrules to meteorite data and found that the model spontaneously generated realistic chondrules. The model also shows that chondrule production coincides with Jupiter’s intense accumulation of nebular gas to reach its massive size. As meteorite data tell us that peak chondrule formation took place 1.8 million years after the solar system began, this is also the time at which Jupiter was born.”

And the resulting information – a deeper insight into how the gas giant came to be, and how it disrupted the existing environment around it – will form the basis for a future in which the formation of the solar system is much less of a mystery.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about a quantum computer simulation that has “reversed time” and physics may never be the same.