Scientists have baked meteorites in a furnace and studied the gases they released to investigate the atmosphere of rocky planets.
In a new study, researchers at the University of Calfornia, Santa Cruz took samples from three pristine specimens meteorites that landed at different times and places around the world and baked them in an oven at 2192 degrees Fahrenheit (1200 degrees Celsius). The scientists analyzed the gases from minerals in the rocks as they heated up in this “furnace”.
“This information will be important when we start to observe the atmosphere of exoplanets with new telescopes and advanced instruments,” said study co-author Maggie Thompson, a graduate student of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, in a statement.
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The three baked meteorites are all of the CM type carbonaceous chondrites, which are made of material that is believed to be representative of the same type of material formed our sun and the planets in our solar system
“These meteorites are leftover materials from the building blocks used in the formation of the planets in our solar system,” Thompson said in the same statement. “Chondrites differ from other types of meteorites in that they have not gotten hot enough to melt, so they have retained some of the more primitive components that can tell us about the composition of the solar system around the time of planet formation.”
These meteorites include the Murchison Chondrite, which fell in Australia in 1969; Jbilet Wilselwan, found in Western Sahara in 2013; and Aguas Zarcas, who landed in Costa Rica in 2019.
The furnace in which the space bricks were fired was connected to a vacuum system and a mass spectrometer, a tool that separates isotopes and molecules based on their mass, which allows scientists to determine the composition of a sample. This process essentially simulates the formation of a planet’s atmosphere at an early stage.
“When the building blocks of a planet come together, the material is heated and gases are produced, and if the planet is large enough, the gases will be trapped like an atmosphere,” co-author Myriam Telus, an assistant professor of Earth and Earth. the planet. sciences at UC Santa Cruz, said in the same statement.
“We’re trying to simulate in the lab this very early process when a planet’s atmosphere is forming, so we can put some experimental limitations on that story,” Telus said. “It may seem arbitrary to use meteorites from our solar system to understand exoplanets around other stars, but studies of other stars have shown that this type of material is actually quite common in other stars.”
The researchers found that water vapor is the main gas produced by the meteorites during the “firing process,” but the rocks also produced significant amounts of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, and smaller amounts of hydrogen and hydrogen sulfide gases.
They compared these findings with predictions they made based on the composition of the meteorites. “Qualitatively,” said Thompson, “we get quite similar results … but there are some differences too.”
This isn’t the first time scientists have heated meteorites to study them, and these researchers hope to continue this work with more meteorites on the way. “You need experiments to see what is really happening in practice. We want to do this for a wide variety of meteorites to provide better limitations for the theoretical models of exoplanetary atmospheres,” Thompson said.
This work was described in a study published April 15 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Email Chelsea Gohd at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.