The birth of cosmochemistry as field of study can be perhaps traced back to the commune of Alès in Southern France, when Louis Jacques Thénard analyzed and published a study on two soft black stones that had fell on a spring evening of 1806. It was a meteorite, now named after the commune it fell in, and the first carbonaceous chondrite identified. The study was an elementary analysis of the strange rock’s composition, and the field would still take more than a century and then some to become fully accepted within the scientific establishment, after Harold Urey engaged in research on the abundance of elements on Earth and beyond.
Meteorites however, have been part of the recorded human history since much before. Marvin (2006) highlights this history of meteorites and is an excellent read going much further back. It has been an experiment-first field since its inception, and one of the principal ways to study composition of these rocks has been through measurement of isotopic ratios. In the same vein, the work which is the subject of this post, also finds its motivation in an observation, inferred through analysis of isotopic abundances in these rocks. Apparently,
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