Award Date

5-15-2026

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Physics and Astronomy

First Committee Member

Jason Steffen

Second Committee Member

Zhaohuan Zhu

Third Committee Member

Stephen Lepp

Fourth Committee Member

Pamela Burnley

Number of Pages

47

Abstract

Chondrites, a type of primitive asteroid, are thought to have formed from dust and gas early in the life of our Solar System. These chondrites have remained unchanged since their formation, avoiding being melted or differentiated like other rocky bodies have. Due to this unique characteristic, chondrites can give us useful insight into how asteroids, planetesimals, and even the terrestrial planets formed. In order to study chondrites and their formation, I used code developed by Li et al. (2020), which utilizes thermodynamic code GRAINS (Petaev 2009), to see what conditions the chondrites may have originated from. GRAINS uses a variety of chemical elements, along with hundreds of gaseous and condensed phases, in order to calculate the chemical equilibrium of a system. I varied multiple parameters of the Solar System’s protoplanetary disk from the values found in Li et al. (2020) in order to find which set of conditions yield simulated results closest to the known chemical composition of various chondrite families. The results from this disk code suggest that the carbonaceous and ordinary chondrites have narrow formation channels, located around 2-4 AU from the sun across most of the simulation length. This result is true across almost all of the best-fitting models. The enstatite chondrites do not seem to have one specific formation location, but have well-fitting regions that start between 3-5 AU and continue outwards in the disk.

Controlled Subject

asteroid; Chondrites (Meteorites); Chondrites (Meteorites)--Analysis

Disciplines

Astrophysics and Astronomy | Physical Sciences and Mathematics | The Sun and the Solar System

File Format

PDF

File Size

11900 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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