Dust concentration and chondrule formation

Meteoritical and astrophysical models of planet formation make contradictory predictions for dust concentration factors in chondrule-forming regions of the solar nebula. Meteoritical and cosmochemical models strongly suggest that chondrules, a key component of the meteoritical record, formed in regions with solids-to-gas mass ratios orders above the solar nebula average. However, models of dust grain dynamics in protoplanetary disks struggle to surpass concentration factors of a few except during very short-lived stages in a dust grain's life. Worse, those models do not predict significant concentration factors for dust grains the size of chondrule precursors. We briefly develop the difficulty in concentrating dust particles in the context of nebular chondrule formation and show that the disagreement is sufficiently stark that cosmochemists should explore ideas that might revise the concentration factor requirements downward.