At the end of last month, a spectacular fireball it illuminated the night sky over the United Kingdom and Northern Europe. Now, locals are beginning to recover the remains of meteorite fragments – and scientists say it could contain “the basics of life.”
An extremely rare meteorite – found on a modest driveway in a Gloucestershire house – marks the first piece of space rock discovered in Britain in 30 years, the Natural History Museum in London said in a statement on Tuesday. It will give researchers a look at what the solar system looked like when it formed, about 4.6 billion years ago.
He was nicknamed the Winchcombe meteorite for the city where he landed.
The rare discovery is the result of a fireball observed on February 28, around 22:00, in the western part of the United Kingdom. The flash lasted about six seconds, the museum said.
The museum is now analyzing fragments of the meteorite, which weighs only 10.6 ounces. The special type of meteorite is known as carbonic chondrite.
“This is really exciting,” museum researcher Sara Russell said in a statement. “There are about 65,000 known meteorites worldwide, and only 51 of them are carbonic chondrites that have been seen to fall like this.”
UK Fireball Alliance
Researchers say the relatively slow speed of the meteorite at about 8 miles per second could be a thank you for the rock’s survival.
“It’s almost amazingly amazing, because we’re working on space missions to return asteroid samples Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx, and this material looks exactly like the material it collects, “Russell said.” I’m just dumbfounded. ”
The man who found the meteorite missed the entrance of the fireball and was surprised to wake up to a “black trace of soot” on his alley. Researchers describe it as looking like coal, but it feels much softer and more fragile.
The sample is in such good condition, it is essentially comparable to rock samples from space missions.
“For someone who had no idea what it really was, the finder did a fantastic job of collecting it,” said Dr. Ashley King, a researcher at the museum. “He wrapped most of it very quickly on Monday morning, maybe less than 12 hours after the actual event. Then he continued to find pieces in his garden for the next few days.”
The museum said the rock probably contained soft clay minerals, suggesting it once contained icy water ice. Carbonaceous chondrites are composed of a combination of minerals and organic compounds, including the constituents of life – amino acids.
This type of meteorite comes from an asteroid that formed millions of years ago, when the planets in our solar system formed. Scientists believe they have valuable information about our early solar system.
The administrators of the Museum of Natural History
“Meteorites like these are relics of the early solar system, which means they can tell us what the planets are made of,” Russell said. “But we also believe that meteorites like this could have brought water to Earth, giving the planet its oceans.”
A record number of people noticed and reported the fireball and there were plenty of ringing camera recordings, dashcam videos and socializing moments to help scientists determine where the meteorite came from.
The British Fireball Alliance has established that the alien rock has risen to Earth from the outer regions of asteroid belt – located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
So much space has been recovered that researchers can use the samples as a kind of test for the types of experiments they hope to perform on meteorites returned from recent space missions.
“There are so many things that just went well,” Russell said. “I was a doctoral student when the last meteorite fell in Great Britain and I have been waiting since. I’ve always dreamed that there would be carbonic chondrite, but don’t expect that to happen at all. It’s absolutely a dream come true. ”