Key facts
- Category
- Meteoritic material
- Object class
- Chondrule
- Scale fact
- 800 µmdiameter
- Composition
- Silicate minerals
Chondrule
800 µmdiameter
Details
A chondrule is a once-molten silicate droplet frozen into a tiny sphere in the early Solar System. These beads formed about 4.5 billion years ago in the solar nebula and were later built into the asteroids that supplied many meteorites.
Chondrule textures show that solid precursor material was heated rapidly, melted at least partly, and then cooled into millimeter-scale beads. The exact heat source remains debated. Whatever the mechanism, many of these beads were later mixed with finer grains and incorporated into chondrite parent asteroids.
Links
- Wikipedia
- Chondrule on Wikipedia
Size neighbors
Objects near Chondrule on the scale
On the logarithmic size axis, Chondrule falls between Micrometeorite and Carbonaceous Chondrite. The band uses nearby Meteoritic material records.
Shared physical scale
2.06m
Sources
References for Chondrule
Measurements and descriptive context are compiled by the Scale of Space team from the references below. If you find an error, please let us know.
- Chondrule — Wikipedia
- Visual reference: Wikimedia Commons (Solar Anamnesis, CC0 1.0)
Continue with nearby objects or open the full scale.
About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides explain selected parts of that range, while focused views filter the objects by subject.