 Gweithio agelio, a ddwy'n meddwl am ymddangos cael ei gweithio arnyn nhw a gweithio mewn gwneud. Yn y ffawr hwyl yma yn cael y pryd. Rwy'n gweithio yma i gyd wedi'i gweithio ar y gwaith, a'r gweithio i'r fyfynion sy'n gyffredig yn Michael Faraday. Mae'n gweithio'r Ynysig Rydym yn cael ei ddwyllion ac mae'r cynghwil wedi'i cymryd i'r gweithio'r y chemist ei wneud a allan o'r cydwyddiadau ac eluig, a dwi'n rhaid i'w cerddwyddiadau, fel oedd yn eluig, sydd y cerddwyddiadau yn ymgyrch. Ielwch i ddweudio cyfnodol a'r ddweudio'n gweithio'r gweithwyddiadau i wneud o'r fforddol yn eithaf i ddweudio'r cydwyddiadau. Rwyf wedyn y gallu bod y ddweudio'r cydwyddiadau'r gweithwyddiadau, ond mae'n rhamwchawr, rhamwchawr. mae'n ddweud, mae'n gwneud o'r ffordd ac mae'n gofyn ychydig yn cwngwyr ac mae'n ddweud o bobl yn cael ei fod yn gweithio'r gwylltig. Doedd yna gweithio'n gwneud o gweithio'n gwneud o'r ffordd, bo'r gweithio'r gweithio'n gwneud o'r gweithio'n gwneud o'r gweithio'n gwneud. Felly mae'n gweithio i gael ei ddweud o'r gweithio, yn gallu yn eu gofyn i gael y cyfaint o hynod o'r bwysig, i gael i'r gweithio. If you look at Seifol's lecture, it shows me sort of cowering in this little cage, but I did that for dramatic purposes because of course I knew that I wouldn't get heard by the electricity as long as I didn't touch the cage. Of course Faraday cages or Faraday buckets are what we use in a lot of our instruments to collect ac yn gweld yr elettron o'r theioedd oed oedd yn eich tro i'r gwbl yn ddod yn hyn. Felly, rwy'n gofio ar gyfer Rhonddaeth ar gyfer y dylunio. Ond ydych chi'n meddwl, mae'r cronwy bai microscope. Yn agor yw meddwl o'r cronwy bai telescop. Mae'r bydd y gwasanaeth yma. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'n credu'n meddwl o'r amser yn gweithio'r bobl. yng Nghwyme, mae'n amser yn ym bun. Yn ym mwyn ymeth, â ym mwyn ym mwyn, mae'n ddod o'i fyneu ar fwy o Fyrel. Felly mae'n ddod o meddwlur a fwy o 400 llwythu llwycofnig o'r gwrth o gwrth o fflyg. Felly mae'n gwneud, mae'n heb. Mae'n fwy o fydd. Mae'n ei fydd i nifer o libwr gaelor, mae'n galexu, â 100,000 ym 100,000 stylu. ac mae'r oedd yn dweud ond iawn. Yn y bod ni, mae'n teisio'r telaesgop, mae'n teisio ond teisio'r telaesgop oedd, mae'n teisio'r telaesgop ar y Tenerife, ac mae'n meddwl ei wneud maen nhw'n gwybod yma'r cyflawn yn sgwrs ac mae'r gaelwch yn ei dweud, gan gaelwch yn dweud i siwr yn gwybod etoedd yma ac mae yna'r pwysig sydd wedi'u dignitych. Felly, ystod o'r usualwyd, ddyn nhw'n gyflawdd. Mae'r ffordd o'r dda i eisiau i'r teisio'r telaesgop. A gallwn i'n meddwl, y gweithio'r bwysig o'r bwysig o'r llai o'r cwyrdd, yma, mae'n ddim o'r 2mm o'r dda. Felly, mae'n gweithio'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r gweithio'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Mae'n myksgopio, mae'n myksgopio o'r ddweud, ac mae'n meddwl o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. One in what we call plain polarised light. So that's just light going into the microscope. And this is what happens if you put a pair of sunglasses on it. So the light is polarised and you get those amazing colours there. So that's this. This is a scanning electron microscope. So this is using light. This is using electrons and we get pictures like this, which tells us the shape, the topography, the bumps in the sample. And this is a map of aluminium, calcium and iron. And it shows that we've got different additions if you add magnesium, iron and calcium in. And you've got more magnesium, you get this. If you've got more calcium, you get this. And this tells us about mineral compositions. And then this thing, and I use both of these, all right? I'm allowed, I'm qualified to use these. This thing here is called the nanosims, all right? And instead of using a beam of light, photons or a beam of electrons, it uses heavy ions, right? It uses something, it uses cesium usually. So that's a very heavy thing. And it bombards the sample. And instead of, you know, just bouncing back nicely, what it does is it drills holes in the sample. And although I beg my colleague Ian Franke to let me use this, he says, no, no, no, we want to go, no, no, it's beyond you, it's beyond you. Your students can use it, but you can't, all right? And what it does is it produces, well, it produces some maps like this, but it produces data, all right? On isotopes, and we'll come back to what isotopes are. So there are three different types of microscope. And this is what I want to try and convince you this evening. And there's a phrase here, which I really don't like, and that's ground truth. Data from meteorites provide ground truth for astronomical observations and astrophysical models. And what that means is if you're an astronomer and you've taken a lovely picture of a galaxy or something, you can think, oh, well, it's this colour, it's this size, it's this age, it's probably doing this. And then we can actually trace some of the things that have come from those processes, what's going on in the galaxies. And we can measure them, we can hold them in our hands. They're real, they're there. They're even more real and there than astrophysicists model. Modelers, they can model anything. They can do whatever they want. They can say, well, given these parameters, and it's like, yeah, well, where did those parameters come from? We put those parameters in there. We say, well, you've got to start with this because we have measured it, it's there. So that's what I mean by ground truth. And we use these techniques. I've shown you the pictures of the optical and the electron microscopes. We also use microscopes that use x-rays and you get the structure just like when you x-ray your hand. You can x-ray a rock and you can see the structure of the rock. And we use spectroscopy. So a rainbow is where the light, white light, has been broken down into different colours based on their wavelengths. Well, we can use all sorts of wavelengths, much wider, much broader than just the visible wavelengths. And we can also divide samples in terms of what their mass is. So if you've got a whole chunk of sort of organic stuff and you can put it into a mass spectrometer through a column which teases out things depending on how fast the molecules can move along that column. And the little ones move ever so fast and the big ones are really much slower. So you can tease them out like that. And then this here is what our nanosims would come under. So we can analyse all sorts of the astrophysically significant materials which is what I'll come to and talk about those. And then you've probably already this already. Astronomers often have to go out to telescopes where it's cold. And sometimes if it's cloudy, they're looking for visible light or infrared or something, it's cloudy and they can't see anything, it's tough. In a lab it's never cloudy. We're not allowed coffee in the labs anymore which is the drawback but there you go. Don't have to worry about clouds. So this is the cycle, the star formation cycle. And yes, I'm still talking about stuff, images that we've had from telescopes here. And where should we start? This is the problem because it's a cycle and we're not exactly sure where we start. Do we start with stellar evolution? So we've got a star, like the sun, it goes through its life cycle. It's going to become a red giant and then it's going to become a white dwarf. Some different types of stars explode to become a supernova. And when the star explodes as a supernova, all the material, all the matter that made up that star gets thrown back out again. It gets thrown back out again into the interstellar medium which isn't just the space between the stars but that's the easiest way of thinking about it. Now the interstellar medium, space between the stars, the space between the galaxies and so on and so forth. There are parts of our galaxy which have got concentrations of gas and dust. The galaxy's mainly hydrogen. There's silicate dust there. Dark clouds. If a dark cloud collapses and it might be triggered to collapse by the explosion of a supernova, as it collapses, star formation happens. So you get stars. The stars might form a disc round from the dust around the star and then the star evolves and eventually might explode as a supernova. And at each one of these stages, material is coming and going through the interstellar medium. And so what we can do with meteorites is we can say, stop, we're going to look at some of these processes that have been going on and find out the information about them. Now is this going to work? Do I have to do it again? Maybe I'll do it again. So this is a simulation, a planetary formation. And it's terribly slow. So we'll probably only watch a little bit of it. But what you can see here is a cloud of gas and dust and it's turbulent, it's rotating and gradually the central mass gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And it gets big enough eventually so the mass causes it to switch on. It's a star, it's undergoing nuclear fusion, it's burning hydrogen. And then it can attract dust to it, which can spin round and be clumped together as planets. And I'm sorry, we're still doing astronomy by telescope here. I just get so moved and excited by some of the pictures that you can see. And this for me is one of the most exciting pictures I have ever seen. You might say get a life, get out a bit more, but just it's amazing. It was taken by the ALMA telescope. Now the ALMA is the Atacama Large Millimetre Array. I have no idea what a large millimetre is. I thought they were all the same size, but I think it's a large array of telescopes which measure things at that millimetre wavelengths. And it took this picture of this star in the centre and the protoplanetary disk forming. It's a real picture, it's not a simulation, it's a real picture. For us to get things like this, just so wonderful. Here's another one, right? Again, in the centre there, what you've got, is you've got a protoplanetary disk. It's a real picture. I just get so excited by them, but I get excited by chocolate as well, but there you go. So what's happened then is once you've had your protoplanetary disk and it started to collapse and it clumps into different things at different places. So we've now got, we've got our sun, we've got the inner planets, we've got the outer planets, and then we've got something called the asteroid belt, which is a mixture of small bodies, the biggest of which is about 1,000 kilometres across, which are mainly rocky, stony and some metallic ones. We've got another belt out here called the Kuiper belt. The objects there are much darker. We know a lot less about them than we do about the asteroids, but they're mainly rock and ice, and this could be where a lot of our comets actually come from, our short-lived comets. Pluto has been promoted. It's no longer a planet. It's no longer the smallest planet in the solar system. It's now one of the biggest Kuiper belt objects. So it's gone through, you know, it's been upgraded. So anybody who says to you, I think Pluto should be a planet, say no, it's been promoted. It's no longer the smallest, most distant, most not-interesting planet in the solar system. It's a really, really, really interesting Kuiper belt object. So most of the stuff that I study comes from the asteroid belt. And here's two asteroids. This is probably the focus of NASA's dawn mission a few years ago. This is Vesta, which is about, I think it's about 500 kilometres across, and this is Ceres, which is about 1,000 kilometres across. Ceres is big enough, actually, to be known as now a minor planet, because it's pulled itself into this spherical shape. Vesta is, you know, it's the classic potato-shaped asteroid, but potato or peanut depends which side of the Atlantic you are on, whether you classify asteroids as potatoes or peanuts. Anyway, this is potato shaped, but you can see they've both got lots and lots and lots of craters on them, which shows they've been bombarded throughout the whole of their history. So things have come and hit them, and when things hit something else, bits shatter off. Most of the bits will fall back down, but some of them, you know, go off, wander off, and some of them eventually fall to the earth as meteorites. Now, these are made of very different types. They're both made of stone, but you can see this one, so the craters are quite sharp. This one, they're more blurred, and it's because this is actually more like a ball of mud, frozen mud. It's got quite a lot of water in it, and in fact these very bright spots here are thought to be evaporites, like we get maybe in a rock pool at the seaside, and so although there's no water on the surface, the minerals it's made of have got a lot of water in it, and it's like a sort of clod of mud rather than a rock, whereas this one is a good solid rock. Right, and they tell us about different things. So now I'm going to teach you all how to classify meteorites, okay? A traditional classification is we've got iron ones, which are made of iron, stony ones made of stone, and stony irons, which are a mixture of stone and iron. All right? Have you got it? Stones, irons and stony irons. Can't go wrong. However, a more modern classification, the way we do it these days, which is much more interesting and tells us a lot more about the meteorites, is we think of them as being primitive or processed. Primitive here means they're undifferentiated. That means they've never been hot enough to melt so that they can separate out inside themselves, okay? So these primitive ones have been very, very little changed. They might have been altered a little bit by water. They might have been a little bit of thermal metamorphism, but they've never got hot enough to totally melt. And we call these ones chondrites. I'll come back to what this odd word is in a minute. And then the other type are the processed ones. These are ones that we call achondrites because they haven't got any of the classic things that chondrites have. And these have been heated. They've been melted. Some of them have been melted completely and so that the metal has separated from the rock just like on the earth because we've got a core our earth is differentiated. And we can learn different things that have been going on in the solar system from these different objects. Now, this is a classification of all the metrites. Would you like me to go through it? Box by box we'll start off with the sea eyes over at this end and work our way gradually across to these. It'll only take all about five or six hours, and maybe we'll skate through that. And we'll just stick with some of the primitive ones. So, this is a hand specimen. It's a chunk about the size of my fist and it's from an asteroid which has got some carbon in it and not a huge amount. It's a meteorite which is called a yendi. Now, what we do with meteorites when we want to look at them with a microscope is the first thing we do is we saw a bit off them. Now, a geologist which at heart is what I am. A geologist, they look at a rock the first thing they do is whack it with a hammer and the next thing they do is they spit on it. Now, a meteorite assist, we are not encouraged to do that. But it's not done. And I'm sure I've never done it, ever. So, what we do here is we would take a section and we would saw it, polish it till it was very thin until it was so thin that you could actually shine light through it and that's about 30 microns or we might embed it in a chunk of resin and just polish the top. And when we do that, you can look in greater detail at the objects that are in these meteorites and these round things are what we call chondrules and that's from a Greek word, chondros, which means droplet or little seed and that's what the first person to identify them or to see them into a microscope, he looked at them and he thought that they were droplets of a fiery rain and that's a really, really great description because, well, we still don't entirely know how these formed but they must involve melting in some way. Now, what you can see on this one here, the hand specimen, you can see all these very irregular features including this bit on top, which is not a bird dropping. It's a very irregular feature. And these things are called CAIs. They are for calcium and aluminium rich inclusions and guess what elements these inclusions are rich in? Yes, they've got lots of calcium and aluminium in them and if you think minerals which have got these, the calcium and the aluminium in them, they are really, really refractory. You can heat them to really high temperatures. So the lining of an oven, for instance, will be made of ceramics, these things which are what these mineral grains are. So what you've got here is something that's fluffy, it's not a regular shape and it's made of calcium and aluminium rich inclusions. These formed at a very high temperature, so the highest temperatures as the gas and dust of the protoplanetary disk was cooling and minerals were forming. There's several different minerals in there but these were probably the first formed things that go into meteorites. The second lot are these things called conjurals. You've got the same picture, you can see the rounded shape and here's a closer view of one. These are not made of calcium and aluminium. These are made of iron and magnesium and silicon and you can see they're very rounded. So you've got a different shape, a different texture, a different composition but formed from the same cloud of gas and dust that has formed the whole of the solar system. So what is the process that has formed has caused these two things, the CAIs and the conjurals to be formed differently? What's happening is you're getting this protoplanetary disk, the presolar nabula is cooling and you're getting changes in turbulence, in the duster gas ratio, in the amount of oxygen that may or may not be there. You can see this, there are at least eight or there were nine processes that have been thought to produce conjurals and my favourite quotation is from a very old colleague who is actually in the audience at the moment. So I better say a dear and esteemed colleague rather than an old colleague. When she said, conjurals are formed by the conjural formation process, whatever that might be. So it's like, and she is an international expert on conjurals and conjural formation and that's about as good as we can get the conjural formation process, whatever that might be. So it could be that alts of lightning went through the dust and fused some of the dust grains together. It could be the shock wave from a supernova or the shock wave from something else or as our protoplanetary disk was travelling through the nabula and it was scooping up stuff. There's all sorts of different ways. Now when we look at this grain though, you can see it's got an extra bit on the side. It must have been tumbling and it's accumulated other bits towards it. So it's helping to actually look at what has been going, the processes that have been going on as the star, the sun was forming. Right now this is very technical but don't worry too much. I'm not going to go through all the radioactive decay equations stage by stage, promise. What I'm going to say is that there are some isotopes that are radioactive and they decay. Uranium decay is to lead. I think we're sort of quite familiar with that. But there are lots and lots and lots of decay system, lots and lots of different isotopes which decay so we've got ones that decay over periods of billions of years or ones which decay over thousands or a million years. And depending on the decay system you choose you can learn different things. So what actually happens is you have a parent which decays to a daughter. Now if you've got uranium and it's decaying to lead what actually happens is and sometimes the remaining uranium stays in one bit and the daughter isotope, the lead, likes to go into another bit. Or aluminium decay into magnesium. You've got one bit going into another bit. So you can actually start looking at the ages of formation things. So this is where we go back to the condrels and the CAIs. We're using a very short lived system. We don't need to know that too much. So if you've got something and you've got aluminium which decays to magnesium and if you've got something and you can find the particular type of magnesium in that mineral that has come from, that magnesium has come from the decay of the aluminium you can say that that mineral must have been around, it must have been forming when the aluminium was still present to be decaying to magnesium. But because the aluminium has such a short half-life it's gone after a few tens of short lives hundreds of half-lives. So you can say, oh right, actually this particular mineral has got that brand of magnesium in so it must have been formed very early on. This mineral hasn't got that brand of magnesium in. It can't have been formed until after all the aluminium has gone. So this is what we're doing here, we're looking and we can say, right, actually and this is a very simplistic picture. It's more complicated but simplistically these that have got the aluminium in they also have some minerals that have got these minerals with aluminium in and so you can look for those aluminium rich minerals and look to see if they've got any magnesium in and if they've got the magnesium in then yes, they were formed really, really early on. Now, another aside, I take every opportunity to get astronomers, you know, because it's fun. If you ask an astronomer how old is the solar system they might say five billion years, four and a half, something like that. We can say that the solar system is 4.5672 plus or minus six million years old. That is very precise, 4,567.2 plus or minus 0.6 million years. That is precise and accurate as we all know the difference. And the age of comdwrels is this, 4.564.7. All right, so the difference between these two phases that you find in intimate contact within a meteorite their age differs by two and a half million years what's two and a half million years between planetary scientists you might say. Well, it's actually quite a lot to keep things separated in a very active and turbulent solar nebula. neu ydych chi'n gallu ymddangos i'r holl o'r ysgol i chi'r ddechrau'r newid. Ond yw'r peth yn ôl bod yn fwy o'r unrhyw o'r mewn gweld ffynnu. Mae'n cyntaf oherwydd i gyffredin i'r Llyfrgell Rhaglen, a a'r Rhagleniaidon i'r Llyfrgell Rhagleniaidon, dyfodd lle'r lle gynnydd i'r proses cyd-ylyniad. Mae'n fyddech chi'n eu bod yn ychydig. So cyllidau cyllidau, yna cynllun cyllidau cyllidau? Well, it's when things happen with elements, when you've got neutrons around. Some elements can absorb a neutron slowly, and this happens when you've not got very many of them. All right? And what happens is an isotope captures a neutron, and it sits there and says, I'm waiting for another one. Oh, but there aren't much. I'm going to decay. All right? And so that's what happens. It decays before it can capture a second neutron. Where you've got a lot of neutrons, all right, you've got this. That's S for slow, R for rapid. We do like to keep things simple. So here you've got a lot of neutrons, so you've got a nucleus atom. It captures a neutron, and then before anything else can happen to it, it captures another one, and maybe another one. All right? So you've got different types of nucleus synthesis processes going on, and they leave their signature in the elements, and they leave them very particularly in pre-solar grains. So when we look at stars, a star isn't a thing that's there, and it doesn't change. A star evolves in the same way as we evolve. All right? And so this diagram here is a complicated picture of what happens to a star. All right? It can start off big, burn fast, die, or it can become out. We're somewhere along here. All right? We've got a lifetime of about 10 billion years, and we're about halfway through it. And this is us. And what's going to happen to us is we're burning hydrogen. Well, the sun's burning hydrogen into helium, then it'll burn helium, and then it'll puff up enormously into a red giant, and then it'll burn all its fuel, and it'll shrivel down into a white dwarf, and it'll die. It's not big enough to do something dramatic like exploding as a supernova. So what we can do is we find products of these processes that have gone on in other stars. We find them in meteorites. And so this is a very busy slide, but I tried to get, you know, I tried to, I tried to reduce the number of slides I've got by putting more on each slide, which is very bad. All right? So pre-solar grains, they're a minor constituent of chondrites, you know, up to 2% max. They were recognised on the basis of their unusual noble gas isotopic compositions. Xenon has got, what, nine stable isotopes? It's got a ridiculous number of isotopes. And sometimes one particular isotope is enhanced over another particular isotope. And so in this one here, the signature, if you've got some gas, some xenon, and you look at it and you say, oh, it's got a lot of xenon 128 and a lot of xenon 132 relative to xenon 130, but hardly any 129 or 131. That is caused by S-process xenon. And S-process xenon is produced in stars, which are going through helium burning and various other processes. And they also have very unusual carbon and nitrogen in them. All right? So this is a picture of carbon and nitrogen. And this, at last, some of my data. This is what I do for a hobby. I burn rocks. And when I burn the rocks, the meteorites, I look at the carbon dioxide that comes off. And I can say, oh, if carbon dioxide has come off at about 1000 degrees C, so I've heated my sample up to 1000. And it's got carbon, which has got a very low, it's got a high delta-13C. You don't need to worry about that. But it would be plotting down here. So it's something which has probably come from an AGB star, an acid-dotic giant branch star, a big star. All right? It's not come from the sun. And these are examples of these types of materials, silicon carbide, graphite, aluminium oxide. I've put for dramatic purposes diamonds, emeralds and rubies. But emeralds and rubies are just aluminium oxide, you know, by any other name. So the other type of material that we've got are these nanodiamants. They're only three nanometers in size. And they're produced. They've got xenon associated them, which has got a lot of the light isotopes down here and a lot of the heavy isotopes. There is no known astrophysical process which can produce a pattern like this. All right? Now, astronomers, when they can't explain an astrophysical process, they either say it's a black hole or it's a supernova. All right? One or the other. Black hole or supernova. Here we've gone for supernova. All right? So we've produced a huge number of neutrons in the explosion of the supernova. And they've produced little diamonds. Now again, it's not terribly certain that this is the right answer for the diamonds. And there's some thought that they might be produced somewhere else, but we don't really know. Now then, I'm going to have to move quickly. Where are we? Organic interstellar material, right? So I've talked about the non-organic stuff, the silicon carbide and things like that. But we've got in some meteorites, and this is a picture of a meteorite called Murchison, which is very rich in carbon. It's got about 28% carbon in, which is buckets for a meteorite. And most of that carbon is a sort of entangled mass of sort of guns, really. It's a mixture of all sorts of different carbonaceous components, some of which have got a lot of deuterium in them, and again, these heavier isotopes of carbon and nitrogen. And what's thought is happening, is in the intercellar medium, things like the dark molecular cloud, where you've got grains of silicate and they're coated with ice, and what's happening is they're being bombarded by radiation. It might be UV radiation, but it might not necessarily get into the molecular clouds, but cosmic rays, cosmic rays, and what's actually happening is you get a whole suite of reactions called ion molecule reactions, which leave the solid stuff behind to be enriched in these isotopes. So what we can actually do is we can use this as a tracer for astrochemistry and look at the evolution of molecular clouds when we look in meteorites for these things, which is quite interesting. Now, origin of life, all right? Some asteroids are rich in water and organic molecules. This is asteroid Ryugu, which was the target of Hayabusa II. And this is Benu, which is the target of Osiris Rex. And this is Comet 67P, Chorymove Gerasimenko, which was the target of the Rosetta mission. Now, this has brought some material back, and it seems to be sort of, we've analysed one of my colleagues, Dr Larkowski, has analysed some of the grains from Ryugu, and he has found that they're medium enriched in hydrogen in carbon, but they seem to have quite a lot of water in them. This is my bit. Can you see? Six or seven little black specks there? Yep, they're mine. Mine, which I've been looking at the reflectance spectrum from, and then I'll burn them. Right, okay, so they're sitting there. And so we've had these from this particular asteroid. We'll be getting some back from Benu in September. They arrived back in September. The Open University is one of three laboratories outside the NASA system, which are getting these materials. Where one, the Natural History Museums one, and I think there's one in Switzerland, right? So I think we're the three European partners which are going to get some of the material from Benu. Now it's possible. These are both, look as if they're like, the types of asteroid that Murchison came from. We've got a handful, about five meteorites, that aren't like Murchison, that aren't like anything else, and possibly come from a comet. Now the Rosetta mission produced, there was an instrument called Ptolymy, which was built at the Open University, and it produced a spectrum, you can see here this is the molecular mass of some of the samples that came from some of the data that came from the mass spectrometer on board, on board Ptolymy, on the Philae lander. And some of these are the signals of alkanes, alcohols, things like that, the types of material, the types of molecules which make up the building blocks of life. So it could be that when the earth first formed, it was bombarded by this sort of material, and so the water came from extra, a portion of it came from extraterrestrial samples. Right, I'm going to have to go really fast now, sorry, processed meteorites, these are the opposite of the primitive ones, some of them, like the ones that come from Vesta, which is like this, they're the solidified remnants of the solar system's earliest magmatic activity, so we've got really old volcanoes on some of these asteroids. Iron meteorites, these are the ones that have actually completely separated out, so if you think about how stainless steels made, or how steels made, you take the iron ore, you heat it up with a catalyst, and what happens is all the iron goes to the bottom of the furnace, and you get a scummy bit on top, the slag, all right. Now, the iron in the core of the earth, and the earth, that's been through the same sort of process, so the core of the earth is the pure iron with some nickel and other bits and pieces in it, and the bits that we're standing on, we're the slag, all right, so we're the slag on the crust of the earth. I won't go into the Wiedmundstadton pattern, but this tells us, this is the closest we can get to the core of the earth, because of course we can't dig down that far. So going back to our radiogenic nuclides, using different half-lives, we can look and see when an asteroid has differentiated, when the core, the metal core is produced, we've got the mantle, which is rich in a mineral called olivine, and you've got the crust, which is rich in a mineral called plagioclase, and you can look at the time scales of when that happened and when that happened by looking at these different systems, and we can bring up this diagram again, we've got the CAIs here, the chondrols, we've got the chondrite formation when they all came together to make the solid bodies, we've got the earth forming here, and then differentiating, and the moon forming, and it all happened, you know, in a very, very short period of time, really rapidly. We've got meteorites from the moon, all right, I'm going to try and finish by a quarter to eight, right, so we've got some meteorites from the moon, we know they're from the moon, because we can compare them with the Apollo samples. We've got meteorites from Mars, how do we know they're from Mars? We haven't got any samples that have been brought directly back from Mars, however, this is a meteorite, which was collected in Antarctica in 1979, and it's got these pockets of glass in, and when you take out, dig out a pocket of that glass and melt it, gas comes out, and the composition of that gas is identical to the composition of Mars' atmosphere. Now, this was taking place in 1984 when people were just recognising that we got meteorites from Mars. That's mine, that's my data point, right, so we analysed this, this is when we were still over in Cambridge actually before we came to the Open University, but that showed you've got the identical composition and the only way that you could get that gas in those glass clasts is those clasts had to be molten, so it's probably when something hit the surface of Mars, blasted material off, and in that instant some of the atmosphere was dropped. Now, knowing that we've got meteorites from Mars, we can then go on and say, let's look at them and see what we can learn about Mars from these meteorites, and I hope my good friend Everett is listening online, he said he was going to be, here you are Ev, this is our meteorite, this is Allen Hills 84001, and Everett Gibson and his colleagues produced an image in 1996 where they showed this, which is a couple of hundred nanometres, sorry micrometres long, and what they said was that it's possible that this is actually a fossilised bacterium, and the substrate is these, which are rosettes of carbonates, which are produced in warmish sparkling water. So they had a, it's a long detective story, a long chain of evidence, and not everybody believes that this is actually a fossilised bacterium, but what it did was it really, you know, literally and figuratively put a rocket up the Mars programme, and now, you know, we're exploring Mars like there's no tomorrow. And so at the moment Perseverance is at Jezero Crater, and sorry I've got some more micros, telescope images or at least from camera images, just look at that, that puts me in minds of Brimham Rocks in Yorkshire, just look at that, look at the way it's balanced, isn't that amazing? It's just like amazing, I can't get over these pictures, just like they're so gorgeous, you know, it's just like wow, they could be seals basking, but they're not of, of, anyway. So there's a Mars sample return mission coming back in about 2033, when I'll be 75, you know, God willing, if I'm still here, I'll be in the lab pestering the head of school. This here is about 20 centimetres long, this is one of the samples, they've produced a depot, is what they're calling, a depot of 10 samples, now to me a depot is you've got 10 samples all gathered together, now these are about sort of between five and 15 metres apart, so that they can be readily collected, I don't call that a depot, I call that a string, anyway, so these are the things, these are cores, which another mission will go to collect. Right, where do they come from, where do we get them, we get them, deserts, look Antarctica, desert, ice, meteorite, dead easy, sometimes though they come without us knowing about it, and this is a fireball from the winchcom meteorite, which fell a couple of years ago now, which is beautiful, this is another beautiful thing, isn't that beautiful, isn't that beautiful, to you it might look like a barbecue briquette, but to me, to me it's got the secrets of the solar system locked up in it, mistrumysys Wilcock and their daughter woke up the next morning of the 29th and found that somebody had been throwing things at their drive, and if you look online you can see through the Natural History Museum some people went and they've dug up the drive and they've taken all this away and it's now going to be on display in the Natural History Museum, and my colleague, the one who doesn't know how chondryls are formed, she went with a toothbrush on her knees to get all the bits from that drive, isn't that dedication, or stupidity, who knows, anyway, right where are we, so this is my almost last slide, what can you learn from meteorites, well the different populations and ages, I didn't go into the age of the pre-solar grains but some of them are maybe two billion years older than actually our solar system, we can learn about molecular cloud evolution, I've talked about that with the organic molecules, we can learn about stellar evolution, the pre-solar grains, the hydrogen burning or the helium burning or the supernova, the CAIs and the chondryls tell us how our protoplanetary disc has evolved, which is not just the origin and evolution of the solar system but the origin and evolution of planetary systems and exoplanets, which is fantastic, we've also got the planetary melting from the acondrites, the core formation from the iron meteorites, we've got the formation and evolution of the moon, the formation and evolution of Mars and the history and fate of water and possibly life on Mars, we've got the origin of life itself all from those little poxy rocks, I hope I've persuaded you that we can do astronomy by microscope and I've just got two final slides, I want to thank my friends and colleagues, especially my family, especially my husband Ian, Caroline this is for you, we went to Houston as colleagues and came back as lovers, Caroline really hates that, no no all right okay and so that's my family and I would also like to thank the institutions that have sheltered me, encouraged me, helped me, especially the ones that gave me money and that's these here and also these missions, Osiris Rex is going to be fantastic when the stuff comes back in September, this when it comes back next century and I owe such a lot to the Royal Society for allowing me to give this lecture but I owe so much to the open university, the open university is just an amazing place to work because of its mission to be open to people's places, methods and ideas which is just a a dream that we can help to educate people who haven't had the opportunity and I love being part of that and it's really really important for me to say that to you thank you very much indeed, well thank you very much Monica, unfortunately my notes on what I'm supposed to do next have been scribbled all over with comments from your talk, I know that people out there if you've got questions you want to send them by slido.com and enter it doesn't say enter the code hashtag f6323 or questions in the hall here, there is a microphone that will roll around, we've probably got about five minutes max so a question from outside, do you have a favourite meteorite and why? Oh gosh well it depends what I'm working on, sometimes my favourite meteorite is Allen Hills 84001, the one from Mars with the clusters of carbonates in, sometimes it's Winchcom, the one that fell recently, so I'm really sorry, no I haven't got a favourite meteorite, I love them all. And here's a great question, how would you convince an eight-year-old to follow a career in planetary science which are the exciting and rewarding bits and what are the challenges? Cool, right well hold on a bit because my grandsons ate in a few weeks time and you know I'll ask him but I think really for more and more people to go out and talk, talk to schools, go and talk to you know scouts and really go out because if the younger children can get the interest and carry on through those difficult teenage years and then get on to university and carry on, I think you know people like Brian Cox have done a fantastic job you know of enthusing people and try and make complex ideas understandable and give people an idea of the excitement of things to come. Question in the second row. Thank you very much for those interesting insights, would you compare what is like for you waiting until the stuff arrives and for some of our colleagues who go out to fetch it? Ah interesting because I've also been out to fetch it and that's great you go out in the field you go to Antarctica and you see some of the rocks and I remember when I was there the the guy who was leading the expedition's Professor Cassidy he just looked at it sort of four newbies there four newbies who'd never been before and he just said you're like fish in a feeding frenzy but he was zapping backwards and forwards trying to pick up all these meteorites it was it it was amazing but you then have to let them go they go to a curation facility and they're not your meteorites um it's it's not easy to compare what it's like waiting for a sample to come back um because things happen all the time I mean like we're waiting for us the samples to come back from from uh uh Ryugu and from Osiris Rex and Winchcom Falls you know and it's just and right in the middle of lockdown oh I know let's what we do let's all go over to Cheltenham oh it's lockdown yes health and safety forms in the universities but yeah it's I don't know I can't answer that question really sorry we can probably squeeze in one more in the second row thanks um Monica you explained about how we could tell those meteorites were from Mars because of the glass and the composition of different elements that would came out of the gas that was in the glass but how do we know what Mars's atmosphere is made from oh because uh this was going on in 1983 1984 the acceptance that these came from Mars um there was the Viking um Orbitus and Landers in 1977 which uh measured the composition of Mars and they found out and and Marina nine had also found that the atmosphere was mainly carbon dioxide and it had a very very particular carbon 12 to 13 C ratio and and that was mimicked the the abundant relative abundances of the different molecules and the isotopic composition any last comments questions otherwise I slide across here because the real thing of the evening apart from thanking Monica for an astonishing presentation that's taken us back four five six seven point something years I love that um but really it's a great honour on behalf of the Royal Society to present Professor Monica Grady with the 2022 Michael Faraday prize for her expertise in communicating science and I think we saw that tonight congratulations fortunately I did not scribble across the thing that says and remember to present Monica with the scroll and the medal congratulations thank you very much