Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
This space rock is a 4.5-billion-year-old time capsule. The Allende meteorite, which fell to Earth in 1969, holds secrets from the very beginning of our solar system. It contains "leftovers" from the formation of the planets—tiny grains that recorded the composition, pressure, and temperature of the solar system in its infancy.
How do we read this ancient history? Join Denton Ebel, Curator of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the American Museum of Natural History, as he reveals the key: chemical thermodynamics. It’s the same science that explains why it takes longer to boil pasta on a mountaintop than at sea level.
Learn how scientists use the laws of energy and matter to study tiny, once-molten droplets called chondrules, test astrophysical theories, understand what our solar system was like as it formed, and even ask how planets might be forming in other solar systems today.
This space rock is a 4.5-billion-year-old time capsule. The Allende meteorite, which fell to Earth in 1969, holds secrets from the very beginning of our solar system. It contains "leftovers" from the formation of the planets—tiny grains that recorded the composition, pressure, and temperature of the solar system in its infancy.
How do we read this ancient history? Join Denton Ebel, Curator of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the American Museum of Natural History, as he reveals the key: chemical thermodynamics. It’s the same science that explains why it takes longer to boil pasta on a mountaintop than at sea level.
Learn how scientists use the laws of energy and matter to study tiny, once-molten droplets called chondrules, test astrophysical theories, understand what our solar system was like as it formed, and even ask how planets might be forming in other solar systems today.
