The origin of s-process isotope heterogeneity in the solar protoplanetary disk Mattias Ek1,2*, Alison C. Hunt1, Maria Lugaro3,4, Maria Schönbächler1 Preprint version of manuscript published in Nature Astronomy on December 9th 2019 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0948-z). Online, free-for-all, access to the published pdf is available through the Springer Nature SharedIt initiative here. 1 Institute for Geochemistry and Petrology, ETH Zürich, Clausiusstrasse 25, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland. 2 Bristol Isotope Group, School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Wills Memorial Building, Queen’s Road, Bristol BS8 1RJ, United Kingdom. 3 Konkoly Observatory, Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences, MTA Centre for Excellence, H-1121 Budapest, Hungary. 4 Monash Centre for Astrophysics, School of Physics and Astronomy, Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia. *e-mail:
[email protected] 1 Rocky asteroids and planets display nucleosynthetic isotope variations that are attributed to the heterogeneous distribution of stardust from different stellar sources in the solar protoplanetary disk. Here we report new high precision palladium isotope data for six iron meteorite groups, which display smaller nucleosynthetic isotope variations than the more refractory neighbouring elements. Based on this observation we present a new model in which thermal destruction of interstellar medium dust results in an enrichment of s-process dominated stardust in regions closer to the Sun. We propose that stardust is depleted in volatile elements due to incomplete condensation of these elements into dust around asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. This led to the smaller nucleosynthetic variations for Pd reported here and the lack of such variations for more volatile elements.