How to make a chondrule

Abstract

Open up almost any stony meteorite, as scientists have been doing for more than 200 years1, and you will find hundreds of millimetre-sized bits of rock. These ‘chondrules’ (named after the Greek for seeds) were formed at the birth of the Solar System, and as such potentially bear witness to conditions — pressures, temperatures, chemical composition and so on — in the solar nebula. But obtaining that information depends on identifying how they formed, a topic tackled by Cuzzi and Alexander on page 483 of this issue2.