At the end of last month, a spectacular one fireball lit up the night sky over the UK and Northern Europe. Now locals are beginning to find leftover meteorite fragments – and scientists say they may contain the “building blocks of life.”
An extremely rare meteorite – found in a modest driveway of a Gloucestershire house – marks the first stretch of space rock discovered in the UK in 30 years, the Natural History Museum of London said in a statement on Tuesday. It gives researchers a glimpse into what the solar system looked like when it formed some 4.6 billion years ago.
They called it the Winchcombe Meteorite, because of the city it landed in.
The rare find is the result of a fireball spotted over the western part of the UK on February 28, around 10pm. The bright flash lasted about six seconds, the museum said.
The museum is now analyzing fragments of the meteorite, which weighs only 10.6 grams. The special type of meteorite is known as a carbonaceous chondrite
“This is really exciting,” museum researcher Sara Russell said in a statement. “There are about 65,000 known meteorites around the world, and of those only 51 are carbonaceous chondrites that have fallen like this.”
UK Fireball Alliance
Researchers say the meteorite’s relatively slow speed of about 8 miles per second may be due to the rock’s survival.
“It’s almost astonishingly amazing as we are working on the asteroid monster return space missions Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx, and this stuff is just like the stuff they’re collecting, ”said Russell. I’m just speechless with excitement. ”
The man who found the meteorite had missed the fireball’s entry and was surprised to wake up to a “black, sooty splash” in his driveway. Researchers describe it as coal, but it feels much softer and more fragile.
The sample is in such good condition that it is essentially similar to rock monsters of the space missions.
“For someone who didn’t really have a clue of what it actually was, the finder did a fantastic job collecting it,” said Dr. Ashley King, a researcher at the museum, in a 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. ‘
The museum said the rock likely contains soft clay minerals, suggesting it once contained frozen water ice. Carbonaceous chondrites are made up of a combination of minerals and organic compounds, including the building blocks of life – amino acids.
This type of meteorite comes from an asteroid that formed millions of years ago, when the planets in our solar system formed. Scientists believe they contain valuable information about our early solar system.
The administrators of the Natural History Museum
“Meteorites like these are remnants of the early solar system, which means they can tell us what the planets are made of,” Russell said. “But we also think that these types of meteorites may have brought water to Earth and supplied the planet with its oceans.”
A record number of people saw and reported the fireball, and there was an abundance of doorbell camera images, dashcam videos, and social media moments to help scientists determine where the meteorite was coming from.
The UK Fireball Alliance determined that the alien rock from the outer regions of the asteroid belt – located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
So much space rock has been recovered that researchers can use the samples as a sort of test run for the types of experiments they hope to conduct on meteorites returned from recent space missions.
“There are so many things that just went well,” said Russell. “I was a PhD student when the last meteorite fell in the UK and I’ve been waiting ever since. I’ve always daydreamed that there would be a carbonaceous chondrite, but you don’t really expect that at all. It’s definitely a dream come true. ”