The Keith Runcorn Thesis Prize 2025 awarded to Hannah Sanderson
Dr. Hannah Sanderson's PhD thesis 'Unlocking planetesimal histories using refined thermal evolution and dynamo generation models'' studied magnetic field generation in planetesimals. Planetesimals were small, rocky bodies which formed in the early Solar System and were the building blocks of the terrestrial planets.
Meteorites are remnants of planetesimals and some of them can record magnetic fields generated in the cores of their parent planetesimals. Since a specific set of conditions are required to generate a magnetic field, we can use these records to understand what planetesimals were like.
In her PhD thesis, Sanderson built a numerical model for planetesimal thermal evolution and magnetic field generation to recover the properties of planetesimals from these metorite magnetisations (Sanderson et al. 2025). She used this to determine the different epochs of magnetic field generation in the early Solar system (Sanderson et al. 2024); recover the properties of specific meteorite parent bodies including the Main Group pallasites and IIE ions; and demonstrate that magnetic field generation is sensitive to differences in planetesimal redox state and water content, so can tell us about the formation environments of planetesimals within the protoplanetary disk.
Read more on the RAS webpages:
- 2025 Thesis Prize winners announced (press release), 9. June, 2026, The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS)
- About The Keith Runcorn Thesis Prize