Postdoctoral Fellowship: AAPF: Obtaining Records of Protoplanetary Disk Magnetism from Paleomagnetism of Meteorites

Katie Bristol is awarded an Astronomy and Astrophysics Fellowship to carry out a program of research and education at Purdue University. The rocks that form in an emerging planetary system contain small metallic domains within them which record the surrounding magnetic field strength at the time of solidification. This project will extract those records from meteorite samples to learn about magnetism in our newborn Sun's planet-forming disk.

These magnetic records will help in determining how the Solar System and other proto-planetary disks formed. For the educational component of the program, students in both urban and rural environments will benefit from an outreach program rooted in the lab, which will then extend via teacher training and production of teaching materials.

The meteorites' refractory inclusions, calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions and amoeboid olivine aggregates, have iron and iron-nickel metals which can be magnetized and measured in the lab at Purdue University. A modeling and theoretical effort will supplement these measurements to derive constraints on magnetic-driven accretion of the protosolar disk.

These are the only in-situ measurements of magnetic field that are obtainable and will provide data that observational techniques are unable to resolve, particularly when probing magnetic fields in young stellar objects other than the Sun. As such, it operates as ground-truth for all studies of planet formation. The project includes outreach activities in Planetary Geology for K-12 students.

Also, virtual labs for K-12 teachers will be developed, providing lesson plans, video demonstrations, and worksheets.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.