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Glass with embedded metal and sulfides (GEMS) are amorphous silicates included in anhydrous interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) and can provide information about material evolution in our early solar system. Several formation processes for GEMS have been proposed so far, but these theories are still being debated. To investigate a possible GEMS origin by reduction of interstellar silicates, we synthesized amorphous silicates with a mean GEMS composition and performed heating experiments in a reducing atmosphere. FeO-bearing amorphous silicates were heated at 923 K and 973 K for 3 hr, and at 1023 K for 1-48 hr at ambient pressure in a reducing atmosphere. Fe grains formed at the interface between the silicate and the reducing gas through a reduction. In contrast, TEM observations of natural GEMS show that metallic grains are uniformly embedded in amorphous silicates. Therefore, the present study suggests that metallic inclusions in GEMS could not form as reduction products and that other formation process such as condensation or irradiation are more likely.

The existence of silica within several debris disks has been suggested. Data on both the spectroscopy and annealing conditions of the various polymorphs of silica need to be investigated, as these data are lacking and incomplete in the literature. We investigate the annealing conditions of silica and prepare various types of silica, including α-cristobalite, α-quartz, coesite, stishovite, and fused quartz, which are natural, synthetic, or commercial samples. This paper presents a new study of both the spectroscopy of relevant silica polymorphs and the conditions under which they form. We compare the results to previous studies and find that there are discrepancies. The interesting result of features similar to those of forsterite should be highlighted, where α-cristobalite and coesite showed similar peaks at 16, 33, and 69 μm as forsterite. The 69 μm band for α-cristobalite is especially very broad and strong and shifts largely to a shorter wavelengths under cooling to low temperatures. The band for coesite, however, is very sharp and shifts only a small amount to longer wavelengths under cooling to low temperatures. We discuss the possibility of silica detection around debris disks.

Crystallization experiments of relatively SiO2-rich amorphous silicates using the mean chemical composition of the silicate portions in GEMS (glass with embedded metal and sulfide), which is a major component in anhydrous interplanetary dust particles and a primitive material of the early solar system, were performed to understand the presence of crystalline silica around young stars and crystallization in GEMS. Olivine crystallized at ~900-1400 K, probably prior to pyroxene. Three different polymorphs of pyroxene, protopyroxene, orthopyroxene, and clinopyroxene, were identified at ≥1000 K. Cristobalite, which is one of the silica polymorphs, crystallized only at high temperatures (≥1500 K). We obtained time-temperature-transformation (TTT) crystallization diagrams. These results suggest that crystallization of a silica polymorph is kinetically difficult in a day or so at ~900-1400 K even for the SiO2-saturated composition, while the crystallization might be possible after metastable olivine crystallization if duration is long enough. The TTT diagram also indicates that the GEMS cooling timescale was ~105 s if they condensed at 1000 K as amorphous silicates and annealed during cooling after the condensation.