Scientists have baked meteorites in an oven and studied the gases they released to investigate the atmospheres of the rocky planets.
In a new study, researchers at the University of Calfornia, Santa Cruz took samples from three greens meteorites which landed at various times and places around the world and baked them in an oven at 2,192 degrees Fahrenheit (1,200 degrees Celsius). The scientists analyzed the gases from the minerals in the rocks as they warmed up in this “furnace”.
“This information will be important when we begin to observe exoplanet atmospheres 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 ripe meteorites are all CM type carbonic chondrites, which are made of materials considered to be representative of the same type of things that the sun and the planets in our solar system formed us.
“These meteorites are materials left over from building blocks that have formed the planets in our solar system,” Thompson said in the same statement. “Chondrites are different from other types of meteorites in that they did not heat up enough to melt, so they stuck to some of the more primitive components that can tell us about the composition of the solar system during the formation of the planet. “
These meteorites included chondrite Murchison, which fell in Australia in 1969; Jbilet Wilselwan, who was found in Western Sahara in 2013; and Aguas Zarcas, who landed in Costa Rica in 2019.
The furnace in which the landed space rocks were baked was connected to a vacuum system and a mass spectrometer, an instrument that separates isotopes and molecules according to their mass, which allows scientists to determine the composition of a sample. This process essentially simulates the formation of a planet’s atmosphere in time.
“When the basic elements 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,” co-author Myriam Telus, assistant professor of Earth and Planetary Science at UC Santa Cruz, said in the same statement.
“We try to simulate this process in the laboratory very early on when a planet’s atmosphere is formed, so that we can put some experimental constraints on this story,” Telus said. “It may seem arbitrary to use meteorites in our solar system to understand exoplanets around other stars, but studies of other stars show that this type of material is actually quite common around other stars.”
The researchers found that water vapor was the main gas produced by meteorites during the “baking” process, but the rocks also produced significant amounts of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide and lower amounts of hydrogen and hydrogen sulfide gases.
They compared these findings with the predictions they made based on the composition of meteorites. “Qualitatively,” Thompson said, “we get pretty similar results … but there are some differences.”
This is not the first time scientists have heated meteorites to study them, and these researchers hope to continue this work with more meteorites along the way. “You need experiments to see what’s actually going on in practice. We want to do this for a wide variety of meteorites to provide better constraints for theoretical models of exoplanetary atmospheres,” Thompson said.
This thing was described in a study published on April 15 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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