Shards of a lost planet from the early solar system may give us evidence of the chaos that surrounded the birth the terrestrial planets, including Earth. Researchers may have found the first relics of an enormous protoplanet that was smashed up into a type of meteorite we see today called a ureilite.

Most of the meteorites we have found on Earth are thought to be bits of asteroids that never grew to be planet sized. Now, Farhang Nabiei at the École Polytechnique …