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From the desk of Bruce Wilkinson:
"Our own Jayesh Das is the lead author (with colleagues at Washington University and the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India) on a super paper that just appeared in Meteoritics and Planetary Science.  Titled: Cosmogenic neon in grains separated from individual chondrules: Evidence of precompaction exposure in chondrules, the paper is an amplification of the excellent in K. Douglas Nelson Lecture that Jayesh gave in the Department this past fall.  The paper deals with spallation-produced 21Ne in olivine grains that were separated from individual chondrules.  From Ancient Greek meaning grain, chondrules are round particles which formed as molten droplets in space before being accreted to their parent asteroids. They are the oldest solid material within our solar system, and are believed to be the building blocks of our planetary system. Jayesh found that several individual olivine grains exhibit a 21Ne excess, a surplus which probably reflects exposure to energetic particles prior to final compaction of the  chondrule. Moreover, there also appears to be insufficient time for this precompaction irradiation to have simply been the result of contemporary particle sources.  This observation is consistent with other data on young, low mass stars, and leads to the suggestion that our Sun may have been 105 times more active in an “early naked T‑Tauri phase”, which are optically-variable stars named after their prototype – T‑Tauri (naked T‑Tauri stars comprise a subset of weak-line T-Tauri stars).



The reference to this fine paper is: Das et al. (2012), Cosmogenic neon in grains separated from individual chondrules: evidence of precompaction exposure in chondrules:  Meteoritics & Planetary Science, v. 47, p. 1869–1883"
Front Page of Das et al paper