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Science 1 December 2006:
Vol. 314. no. 5804, p. 1349
DOI: 10.1126/science.314.5804.1349m
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Round globules of organic material pepper some primitive meteorites. Many are hollow spheres with thin carbon-rich shells just micrometers in size. Nakamura-Messenger et al. (p. 1439) have measured isotope ratios of 15N/14N and D/H for these carbon nanospheres in the Tagish Lake meteorite and show that the ratios are much higher in the spheres than in the rest of the matrix. Similar hotspots were seen before in meteorite organic material but not localized to particular grains. The isotope ratios indicate that the spheres were formed at very low temperatures, around 10 to 20 kelvin, that are characteristic of cold pre-solar molecular clouds.




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