Yves Marrocchi

The young Solar System resembled a giant construction site: around the newborn Sun swirled a disk of gas and dust, and from this dust gradually assembled stones, boulders, and then planetary embryos — planetesimals. Today, their fragments fall to Earth as meteorites.

Three cabinets full of rocks. In one, metallic grains and the gray mineral enstatite; in the second, the same grains but with rusty streaks; in the third, layered clays swollen with water. All three sets were pulled from meteorites that fell to Earth: chondrites. They were born in the same gas-and-dust disk around the young Sun, yet somehow turned out so different.