Martin Bizzarro

The 2026 Jean Dominique Cassini Medal & Honorary Membership is awarded to Martin Bizzarro in recognition of outstanding contributions towards understanding the origin of the minor and major bodies of our Solar System.

Meteoritics and cosmochemistry were traditionally treated as specialised disciplines with little connection to modern astrophysics. Martin Bizzarro recognized the need for this to change in order to make significant progress in our understanding of planet formation, especially given the background of new exoplanet discoveries. Based on this vision, he founded in 2009 the 'Centre for Star and Planet Formation' at the University of Copenhagen; a center bridging cosmochemistry, astrophysics and astronomy. This allowed him to propel his research to a new level, integrating innovative studies of the isotopic composition of material from meteorites with physical models and astrophysical concepts. His research is multidisciplinary, groundbreaking, and at the forefront of the field.

Martin Bizzarro's group reported the first assumption-free chronology of the earliest Solar System solids found within primitive meteorites. This challenging and pioneering work now provides a reference for the age of the Solar System (4567.30±0.16 million years) and demonstrates that the bulk of the precursor material to planets formed in the first million years of our Solar System, providing a framework to understand planet formation mechanisms. In a series of papers, his group has shown that the isotopic make-up of rocky planets and asteroids in the Solar System is not random but varies in a systematic way. This influential work demonstrates that the isotopic compositions of planets is akin to DNA and can track the origin of their precursor material, including volatiles and water. Together with collaborators from theoretical astrophysics, Martin Bizzarro's group recently proposed a new chronology for the formation of the Earth and other terrestrial planets. Combining analyses of extraterrestrial materials and numerical simulations, he and his group have shown that Earth and other terrestrial planets in the Solar System could have formed within only a few million years rather than the traditional view of over 100 million years. These results challenge our understanding of terrestrial planet formation processes and timescales as well as the origin of Earth’s volatiles that are critical to life. This new view suggests that the formation of rocky, potentially habitable planets is a rapid and efficient process, predicting that such planets are widespread in the galaxy.

These pioneering contributions to cosmochemistry and planet formation makes Martin Bizzarro truly deserving of the 2026 Jean Dominique Cassini medal.