A piece of space that rocks ignited the air over England on 28 February was found.
The sung hump of asteroid was discovered in the driveway of a house in Winchcombe, a small town in the county of Gloucestershire in the south-west of England. The rock, which weighs nearly 300 grams, is the first meteorite experts said since 1991 in the UK, and the first known carbonaceous chondrite ever discovered in the country.
Carbonaceous chondrites are especially pristine and primitive meteorites that generally contain a lot of organic matter, including complex molecules such as amino acids. Studying carbonaceous chondrites could shed light on the early solar system and how the building blocks of life found their way to Earth, researchers say.
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Such a study is already underway in the Natural History Museum in London, where the meteorite now resides.
“It’s really exciting. There are about 65,000 known meteorites around the world, and only 51 of them are carbonaceous chondrites that can be seen like this,” said Sara Russell, a meteorite scientist at the museum. said in a statement.
“This is almost surprisingly surprising, because we’re working on the asteroid-monster-return-space missions Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx, and this material looks exactly like the material they collect,” Russell said. “I’m just speechless with excitement.”
Japan’s Hayabusa2 Mission returned about 4.5 g of the asteroid Ryugu to Earth in December 2020, and NASA’s OSIRIS REx probe collects a big monster of the space rock Bennu in October of that year. The Bennu pieces will land here on Earth in September 2023, if all goes according to plan.
The newly discovered meteorite was spotted shortly after it came down. Residents of Winchcombe House saw black stains on their driveway on the morning of March 1, the day after the fireball burned brightly in the air of England. They soon collected pieces of the space rock that made the marks and contacted the UK Meteor Observation Network, which then contacted staff from the Natural History Museum.
“For someone who did not really have an idea of what it actually was, the finder did a fantastic job of collecting it,” Ashley King, another meteorite researcher at the museum, said in the same statement.
“He packed most of it quickly Monday morning, maybe less than 12 hours after the actual event. He kept finding pieces in his yard for the next few days,” King added. “It looks a bit like coal. It’s really black, but it’s much softer and is very fragile. It’s exciting for us because this kind of meteorite is incredibly rare, but it contains important clues about our origin.”
The parent bodies of carbonaceous chondrites can hit the Earth’s atmosphere at more than 240,000 km / h (240,000 km / h), King said. But the February 28 fireball comes in much slower, at ‘only’ 50,000 km / h (31,000 km per hour), which explains why some pieces of the rock survived the fiery ordeal.
‘The fact that it was fairly slow, and that it was then collected so quickly after it landed, and that it could not prevent any rainfall that would change its pristine composition, means that we were just really lucky with everything, he said.
A number of fireball cameras captured the event on February 28, allowing researchers to calculate a probable landing zone for meteorites and determine a rough orbit for the parent body. These analyzes indicate that the object originated from the outer area of the highway asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, scientists said.
Many more meteorite fragments of the fireball can wait to be found on February 28th. If you spot something in the Gloucestershire area that you suspect is a space rock, take it down and record the location, the Natural History Museum said. Then collect a sample with a gloved hand, store the items in aluminum foil and contact the museum.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.