Our Solar System is filled with relics from its past such as comets, asteroids, chondrules. In its earliest phases, the Solar Nebula was a gas-rich protoplanetary disk harboring prebiotic planetary building blocks in various volatile and refractory forms. Going back even further along the evolutionary sequence, the innate Solar disk was formed from a prestellar core. Our International Team aims to trace the volatiles observed in comets today to their roots in the Solar Nebula and the core that collapsed to form our Solar System. We aim to inventory the molecules dominating Solar System’s ices, including species of astrobiological significance. We wish to also consider the historical information hidden in various isotopic ratios, D/H, 15N/14N, 13C/12C, as well as in the multiple oxygen and sulfur isotopes. The proposed program focuses on uniting researchers across the fields of star formation, astrochemistry, disks (protoplanetary, transition and debris) and cometary science with their common use of ground-based facilities such as ALMA and the VLT. Some of the questions to be addressed would be: How to target common tracers? Are there any specific molecules or isotopic ratios that we should focus on? How do the positions of snowlines in disks affect planet-building materials? We also intend on understanding how to exploit the unprecedented capabilities of the JWST and how they can be coupled with ground-based observations. These efforts will culminate in the design of a large observational campaign to obtain consistent datasets that can be used to trace the provenances of our Solar System’s relics from core to disk stages.
Image Source: NASA/Jenny Mottar