What Crystals Older Than the Sun Reveal About the Start of the Solar System

Microscopic crystals extracted from meteorites could help settle a debate about the birth of our patch of the Milky Way.

The standard story of the origin of our solar system has gone like this: 4.6 billion years ago, a giant cloud of dust hung frozen in space. Then the explosion of a nearby star caused part of that dust cloud to collapse. Pulled by gravity toward a central point, the dust coalesced into a radiating ball of hydrogen and helium about 1.4 million kilometers in diameter — what would become our sun.

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