Ancient meteorite minerals reveal a surprisingly strong magnetic field from the solar system’s first 200,000 years.

About 4.6 billion years ago, before the Sun and planets existed in their familiar forms, the solar system was a vast cloud of gas and dust. Within a few million years, this “solar nebula” collapsed and flattened into a disk, setting the stage for matter to gather into the Sun and the planets that orbit it.

Gravity has long been considered the main force behind this transformation. New evidence from some of the oldest known meteorite material, however, suggests that magnetism was also involved.