A small shard of meteorite that arrived on Earth in 2008 appears to have come from the asteroid, according to researchers who studied the sample.
The parent asteroid appears to be about the size of Ceres, the dwarf planet being the largest object in the asteroid belt, the researchers say. It also appears to have formed around water and under some pressure, they found.
Meteors and meteorites can be an important way to understand more about our solar system, as they come from asteroids left over from the formation of our planet and its surroundings.
While many have remained in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, others have broken up and pieces sent into the inner solar system. One of those pieces arrived 12 years ago and has been used to study the still-mysterious, large overlying asteroid that appears to be hiding in our solar system.
The shard of the meteorite known as Almahata Sitta, or AhS, was already remarkable. It arrived on Earth in 2008, when a 9-ton asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded somewhere above Sudan in some 600 meteorites.
It was the first time that scientists could predict an asteroid impact before it actually happened. That meant they were able to scoop up 23 pounds of samples, which have since been the subject of scientific research.
“We were assigned a 50 milligram AhS sample to study,” said SwRI Staff Scientist Dr. Vicky Hamilton, lead author of an article published in Nature Astronomy, said in a statement. “We mounted and polished the small shard and used an infrared microscope to examine its composition.
“Spectral analysis identified a range of hydrated minerals, particularly amphibole, indicating intermediate temperatures and pressures and a prolonged period of aqueous change on a parent planoid at least 400 and up to 1100 miles in diameter.”
Such amphiboles are rare in meteorites such as Almahata Sitta, which are known as carbonaceous chondrite and serve as a record of the universe’s earliest stages. As such, it could provide a new source of information about the materials that were present in the early solar system.