A meteorite found in the UK contains an extremely rare combination of minerals that could give scientists a sense of how the solar system came to be and even how life on Earth came to be.
The meteorite tumbled to Earth on Feb. 28, when a dazzling fireball zoomed over South West England, Live Science previously reported. At the time, scientists suspected that quite a few fragments of the space rock likely reached the ground.
According to a statement from the Natural History Museum in London, one of these fragments ended up in a driveway in Winchcombe, a town in Gloucestershire.
The house’s residents saw a black, sooty stain in their driveway, packed up pieces of the meteorite, and quickly alerted the UK Meteor Observation Network, which then contacted the Natural History Museum.
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“For someone who didn’t really have an idea of what it actually was, the finder did a fantastic job collecting it,” said Ashley King, a researcher at the museum who studies meteorites, in the statement.
He packed up most of it very quickly on Monday morning, maybe less than 12 hours after the actual event. After that, he kept finding pieces in his garden for the next few days. ‘
It’s important to collect fallen meteorites soon after they hit the ground because they can be quickly contaminated from rain or exposure to the atmosphere, Live Science reported. In total, the fragments collected weigh nearly 300 grams and represent the first pieces of fallen space rock recovered in the UK since 1991, according to the museum statement.
When examining the rocky fragments, the museum researchers identified the meteorite as a carbonaceous chondrite, a rare type of meteorite that comes from an ancient asteroid that was forged in the early days of the solar system when the first planets formed.
“Meteorites like these are relics from the early solar system, which means they can tell us what the planets are made of,” Sara Russell, a researcher at the museum who studies carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, said in the statement.
“But we also think … that meteorites like this may have brought water to Earth and supplied the planet with its oceans.”
New images of the #fireball tonight. Sent by Katie Parr pic.twitter.com/J4jmsM9tFj
– UK Meteor Network (@UKMeteorNetwork) February 28, 2021
The meteorite itself looks a bit like coal, but is much softer and more fragile, King said in the statement. The texture indicates that the space rock contains soft clay minerals and therefore once contained water ice. In general, carbonaceous chondrite meteorites usually contain a mix of minerals and organic compounds, including amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins.
“It’s almost astonishingly amazing because we are working on the asteroid monster reentry space missions Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx, and this material looks exactly like the material they are collecting,” Russell said in the statement.
Both spacecraft were designed to intercept and collect asteroid samples; Hayabusa2 returned to Earth in 2020 with 4.5 grams of space rock, and OSIRIS-REx will deliver approximately 60 grams of samples in 2023, according to the statement.
But thanks to the Winchcombe meteorite, the museum researchers now have more than 280 grams of carbonaceous chondrite to study. The minerals likely survived their fall to Earth because they descended relatively slowly, hitting the ground at 28,800 mph (46,800 kph), the researchers noted.
While that sounds fast, meteorites can reach speeds of up to 154,800 mph (252,000 km / h) as they fly through the atmosphere – a speed that will cause carbonaceous chondrite to disintegrate before it ever hits the ground, King said in the statement.
Regarding the Winchcombe Meteorite, “the fact that it went quite slowly and then collected so quickly after landing, avoiding rainfall that could alter its pristine composition, means we just got really lucky with everything,” she said.
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This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.