Scientists have baked meteorites in a furnace and study the gases they release to investigate the atmosphere of rocky planets.
In a new study, researchers at the University of Calfornia, Santa Cruz took samples of three pristine meteorites which landed at different times and places around the world and baked it in an oven at 1,200 degrees Celsius. The scientists analyzed the gases that came from minerals in the rocks while heating them in this ‘furnace’.
“This information will be important if we can observe the atmosphere of exoplanets with new telescopes and advanced instruments,” co-author Maggie Thompson, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, said in a statement.
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The three baked meteorites are all CM type carbonaceous chondrites, made from materials considered to be representative of the same type of material as formed our sun and the planets in our solar system.
“These meteorites are residual material from the building blocks that formed the planets in our solar system,” Thompson said in the same statement. ‘Chondrites differ from other types of meteorites in that they have not become hot enough to melt, and therefore they have retained some of the more primitive components that can tell us about the composition of the solar system around the formation of the planet. “
These meteorites included 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 collapse of space bricks was baked is connected to a vacuum system and a mass spectrometer, an instrument that separates isotopes and molecules according to their mass enabling scientists to determine the composition of a sample. This process essentially simulates the formation of a planet’s atmosphere.
“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 retained as an atmosphere,” said co-author Myriam Telus, an assistant professor. in Earth and planet. sciences to UC Santa Cruz, said in the same statement.
“We try to simulate this very early process in the laboratory when the atmosphere of a planet forms, so that we can place experimental constraints on the 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 found that this type of material is actually quite common in other stars.”
The researchers found that water vapor is the most important gas produced by the meteorites during the “baking 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,” Thompson said, “we get pretty similar results … but there are some differences, too.”
This is not the first time that scientists are heating up meteorites to study it, and these researchers hope to continue this work with more meteorites along the way. “You need experiments to see what’s really happening in practice. We want to do that for a wide range of meteorites to provide better constraints for the theoretical models of exoplanetary atmosphere,” Thompson said.
This work was described in a study published on April 15 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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