Solar Elemental Abundances

Understand

Review of the history of solar system elemental abundances with a new assessment of elemental and isotopic abundances from CI-chondrites and solar data.

• Solar elemental abundances, or solar system elemental abundances refer to the complement of chemical elements in the entire solar system.
• The sun contains more than 99-percent of the mass in the solar system and therefore the composition of the sun is a good proxy for the composition of the overall solar system.
• The solar system composition can be taken as the overall composition of the molecular cloud within the interstellar medium from which the solar system formed 4.567 billion years ago.