Researchers from a French university have finally discovered a meteor fragment discovered in May 2020 in the Algerian Sahara Desert that was probably “at least 100 years”.
The piece of meteor, designated Erg Chech 002 (EC 002), is believed to date back 4.5 billion years, in the early days of the solar system. Of volcanic origin, it detached from a protoplanet some 26 million years ago and continued its journey through space, eventually plummeting to Earth, where it rested for about a century before being uncovered.
The scientific find is documented in a new study published in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, in which geochemists from the French University of Brest explained how rare the meteor is, just one of 65,000.
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The reason for the meteor’s rarity is believed to be that other species of this material were either part of other planets or were pulverized by the chaotic and evolving solar system after dislodging.
“No asteroid shares the spectral features of EC 002, indicating that almost all of these bodies have disappeared, either because they became the building blocks of larger bodies or planets, or were simply destroyed,” said the researchers.
The formation of its structure “Is poorly understood, in part due to the scarcity of available samples,” the newspaper also noted. There are believed to be about a hundred fragments of the meteor, but so far only 43 have been identified and officially categorized, the AFP reports.
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