We know Arrested development has not been around for a while, but we think it would be the perfect time for a ‘free’ Lucille. Because a resident of Winchcombe, Gloucestershire in England, found an extremely rare type of meteorite in their driveway, which may give us insight into the early solar system. Except to offer the same kind of material that would otherwise require a billion-dollar space mission to pick up.
The Smithsonian Magazine reported on the meteorite recently discovered, which the Winchcombe resident recovered from after a recent fireball event. The meteor that caused the line of fire in the air on 28 February soared into the sky on 28 February. Multiple cameras captured the event, making videos like the one directly below possible.
Scientists say the meteorite is a carbonaceous chondrite. This type of meteorite is existing rock of the early solar system and is perhaps the rarest type; consists of up to 5% carbon in various forms, including organic matter. As well as “exotic” diamond and graphite grains from before the birth of the Sun.
“It’s really exciting,” Professor Sara Russel, a researcher at the Museum, said in a press release. “There are about 65,000 known meteorites worldwide, and only 51 of them are carbonaceous chondrites seen like this.”
Natural History Museum
The 300 gram meteorite probably contains soft clay minerals, indicating the presence of frozen water ice from the past. The meteorite may even have amino acids, which are the “building blocks” of life.
“Meteorites like these are remnants of the early solar system, which means they can tell us what the planets are made of,” Russel added in the press release. “But we also think that meteorites like these may have brought water to the earth and supplied the oceans to the planet.”
Natural History Museum
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the meteorite, however, is how difficult it would have been otherwise to retrieve something similar from space. The OSIRIS-REx monster return mission, for example, recently sent a spacecraft to an asteroid to recover the same type of meteorite. And the mission cost nearly $ 1.2 billion dollars. Which means that this finding was not just a freebie: it was a astronomical freestyle.
Function image: Natural History Museum
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