Late last month, a spectacular fireball illuminating the night sky over the United Kingdom and Northern Europe. Now locals are beginning to repair remaining meteorite fragments – and scientists say they may contain the ‘building blocks of life’.
An extremely rare meteorite – found on a modest driveway of a house in Gloucestershire – is the first piece of space rock discovered in the UK in 30 years, the Natural History Museum in London said on Tuesday. This will give researchers a look at what the solar system looked like when it formed, about 4.6 billion years ago.
They called it the Winchcombe Meteorite, for the city where it landed.
The rare find is the result of a fireball spotted on 28 February, around 10pm, in the western part of the UK. 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. This special type of meteorite is known as a carbonaceous chondrite.
“It’s really exciting,” museum researcher Sara Russell said in a statement. “There are about 65,000 known meteorites worldwide, and only 51 of them are carbonaceous chondrites seen like this.”
UK Fireball Alliance
According to researchers, the meteorite’s relatively slow speed could be about 8 miles per second to thank for the rock’s survival.
” This is almost surprising, as we are working on the asteroid monster return space shipments Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx“and this material looks exactly like the material they collect,” Russell said. “I’m just speechless with excitement.”
The man who found the meteorite missed the fireball’s entry and was surprised to wake up with a ‘black, sooty splash mark’ on his driveway. Researchers describe it as coal, but feel much softer and more fragile.
The sample is in such good condition that it is essentially comparable to rock monsters from the space missions.
“For someone who did not really have an idea of what it actually was, the finder did a fantastic job of collecting it,” Dr. Ashley King, a researcher at the museum, said in a statement. “He quickly packed most of it Monday morning, maybe less than twelve hours after the actual event. He continued to find pieces in his yard for the next few days.”
The museum said the rock probably contained soft clay minerals, suggesting it once contained frozen water ice. Carbonaceous chondrites consist of a combination of minerals and organic compounds, including the building blocks of life – amino acids.
This type of meteorite stems from an asteroid that formed millions of years ago when the planets formed in our solar system. Scientists believe they contain valuable information about our early solar system.
The trustees 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 meteorites like these may have brought water to Earth and provided the planet with its oceans.”
A record number of people spotted and reported the fireball, and there was an abundance of footage footage, dashcam videos and social media moments to help scientists determine where the meteorite was coming from.
The UK Fireball Alliance has determined that the extraterrestrial rock has been zoomed in from the outer regions of the earth to the earth 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 kinds of experiments they hope to perform on meteorites returned from recent space missions.
“There are so many things that just went right,” Russell said. “I was a PhD student when the last British meteorite fell, and I have been waiting ever since. I have always dreamed that there would be a carbonaceous chondrite, but you do not expect that to happen at all. It is absolute a dream come true. ”