A new study published Thursday in the journal Science reveals that laboratory measurements of magnetic fields trapped in the grains of a primitive meteorite are providing important clues in the evolution of the early solar system.

Researchers of the study, led by graduate student Roger Fu and professor Benjamin Weiss of the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, analyzed a meteorite known as Semarkona, which crashed in northern India in 1940 and is considered one of the most pristine space rocks of the early solar system.

“The measurements made by Fu and Weiss are astounding and unprecedented,” said astrophysicist and co-author Steve Desch of ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, in a recent statement. “Not only have they measured tiny magnetic fields thousands of times weaker than a compass feels, they have mapped the magnetic fields’ variation recorded by the meteorite, millimeter by millimeter.”

The research team extracted individual pellets, known as chondrules, from a sample of the meteorite and measured each grain’s magnetic orientations. This process confirmed that the meteorite was unaltered since its formation in the early galactic disk, allowing the team to continue measuring each grain’s magnetic strength and calculating the original magnetic field in which they were made.

“Explaining the rapid timescale in which these disks evolve — in only a few million years — has always been a big mystery,” said Fu, according to MIT. “It turns out that this magnetic field is strong enough to affect the motion of gas at a large scale, in a very significant way.”

According to the statement, the researchers found that the early solar system had a magnetic field as strong as five to 54 microteslas, which is up to 100,000 times stronger than what exists today in interstellar space.

“The new experiments probe magnetic minerals in chondrules never measured before,” said Desch. “They also show that each chondrule is magnetized like a little bar magnet, but with ‘north’ pointing in random directions.”

“My modeling for the heating events shows that shock waves passing through the solar nebula is what melted most chondrules,” said Desch. “This is the first really accurate and reliable measurement of the magnetic field in the gas from which our planets formed.”