ISSI Team "Provenances of our Solar System’s relics"

Research Project, 2020 – 2021

Our Solar System is filled with relics from its past such as comets, asteroids, and chondrules. In its earliest phases, the Solar Nebula was a gas-rich protoplanetary disk harbouring prebiotic planetary building blocks in various volatile and refractory forms. Going back even further along the evolutionary sequence, the innate Solar disk was formed from a pre-stellar core.

In the ISSI international team Provenances of our Solar System’s relics we aim to trace the volatiles observed in comets today to their roots in the Solar Nebula and the core that collapsed to form our Solar System. One of our goals is to inventory the molecules dominating Solar System’s ices, including species of astrobiological significance. Another aspect is to consider the historical information hidden in various isotopic ratios, D/H, 15N/14N, 13C/12C, as well as in the multiple oxygen and sulfur isotopes. The program focuses on uniting researchers across the fields of star formation, astrochemistry, disks (protoplanetary, transition and debris) and cometary science with their common use of ground-based facilities such as the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and the VLT. The team also intends to learn how to exploit the unprecedented capabilities of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and how they can be coupled with ground-based observations.