It’s 0300, at BESSY II – the synchrotron in Berlin. We’re having a philosophical debate about what makes ‘science’ science.  Our PI is currently checking wikipedia for ‘Scientific Method’ (I’m pretty sure he should know this by  now…).   This is pretty characteristic for a beam time, where you work all night, having very little to do other than click the odd button, and occasionally make some very specific alignments to a very complicated machine.  It’s tiring, it brings out the weird side in people, but crucially – it’s make or break time in terms of the next 6 months worth of data we’re going to have to play with.  When a beam time goes well, it can be Nature worthy.  When it goes badly, you can fly home at the end of the week, exhausted and with a hard drive full of nothing but blurred, useless images.

 

So why do we put ourselves through it, when we could be travelling all over the world making friends with meerkats or watching volcanoes erupt? It’s pretty simple – the prospect of good data and finding out something new is really, really exciting.

Using synchrotron x-rays to image the magnetic signals recorded by meteorites is a very recently developed technique, which means any result we get are new.  It’s also one of the few techniques capable of teasing out paleomagnetic signals, recorded billions of years ago during the earliest days of the solar system, where planets, asteroids and other large bodies of rock and metal were hurtling around space and into each other.  A lot of the samples we bring to look at have barely been studied before, so we have no idea what we’re going to find.  It can also be nerve racking though – if we want to test a hypothesis that has developed over the last 6 months of hard work, and this data disproves it, it’s all been for nothing. As one of our collaborators, Julia says:

“One beam time is one paper, two beam times is no papers.”

 

Exploring samples is  somewhat surreal – as a geologist, I’m used to thinking about big landscapes, big time periods and big processes.  Here, we sit with a ‘map’ of a 5mm by 5mm region of a meteorite, imaged using a reflected light microscope and say ‘I think we should go here next, and then work along this surface, then go over here’ – which is pretty much exactly the same sort of plan I’m used to making when doing fieldwork – just on a much, much smaller scale. It gets smaller still though – the features we’re actually navigating here are on a nanometre scale, which is hard to remember when they appear on the screen in front of you in all their high resolution, red-white-and-blue glory.

 

This week we’re looking at two samples.  The first is a IVA iron meteorite, thought to have come from a ‘naked core’ which has had its mantle ripped off in space, and may have subsequently formed a metallic crust and an inner, active molten dynamo core.  The second is a mesosiderite, a very understudied class of meteorites, which is a scrambled mess of igneous fragments (with a composition similar to that you’d expect to find in the Earth’s mantle) and iron nickel metal, possibly from its core.  So far the data is looking good, and we’ve even found magnetic structures we haven’t seen before!

 

It’s 0300, at BESSY II – the synchrotron in Berlin. We’re having a philosophical debate about what makes ‘science’ science.  Our PI is currently checking wikipedia for ‘Scientific Method’ (I’m pretty sure he should know this by  now…).   This is pretty characteristic for a beam time, where you work all night, having very little to do other than click the odd button, and occasionally make some very specific alignments to a very complicated machine.  It’s tiring, it brings out the weird side in people, but crucially – it’s make or break time in terms of the next 6 months worth of data we’re going to have to play with.  When a beam time goes well, it can be Nature worthy.  When it goes badly, you can fly home at the end of the week, exhausted and with a hard drive full of nothing but blurred, useless images.

 

So why do we put ourselves through it, when we could be travelling all over the world making friends with meerkats or watching volcanoes erupt? It’s pretty simple – the prospect of good data and finding out something new is really, really exciting.

Using synchrotron x-rays to image the magnetic signals recorded by meteorites is a very recently developed technique, which means any result we get are new.  It’s also one of the few techniques capable of teasing out paleomagnetic signals, recorded billions of years ago during the earliest days of the solar system, where planets, asteroids and other large bodies of rock and metal were hurtling around space and into each other.  A lot of the samples we bring to look at have barely been studied before, so we have no idea what we’re going to find.  It can also be nerve racking though – if we want to test a hypothesis that has developed over the last 6 months of hard work, and this data disproves it, it’s all been for nothing. As one of our collaborators, Julia says:

“One beam time is one paper, two beam times is no papers.”

 

Exploring samples is  somewhat surreal – as a geologist, I’m used to thinking about big landscapes, big time periods and big processes.  Here, we sit with a ‘map’ of a 5mm by 5mm region of a meteorite, imaged using a reflected light microscope and say ‘I think we should go here next, and then work along this surface, then go over here’ – which is pretty much exactly the same sort of plan I’m used to making when doing fieldwork – just on a much, much smaller scale. It gets smaller still though – the features we’re actually navigating here are on a nanometre scale, which is hard to remember when they appear on the screen in front of you in all their high resolution, red-white-and-blue glory.

 

This week we’re looking at two samples.  The first is a IVA iron meteorite, thought to have come from a ‘naked core’ which has had its mantle ripped off in space, and may have subsequently formed a metallic crust and an inner, active molten dynamo core.  The second is a mesosiderite, a very understudied class of meteorites, which is a scrambled mess of igneous fragments (with a composition similar to that you’d expect to find in the Earth’s mantle) and iron nickel metal, possibly from its core.  So far the data is looking good, and we’ve even found magnetic structures we haven’t seen before!