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A piece of space rock that lit the sky over England on February 28 Was found.
The song sung by 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 10.6 ounces (300 grams), is the first meteorite found in the UK since 1991, experts said, and the first known carbonaceous chondritis ever to be found in the country.
Carbonaceous chondrites in particular are pristine, primitive meteorites that usually contain a lot of organic matter, including complex molecules such as amino acids. The study of carbonaceous chondrites may shed light on the beginnings of the solar system and how the building blocks of life found their way to Earth, the researchers say.
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Such a study is already underway at the Natural History Museum in London, where the meteorite now resides.
“It’s really exciting. There are around 65,000 known meteorites all over the world, and of these, only 51 are carbonaceous chondrites that have been seen falling like this one,” Sara Russell, meteorite specialist at the Museum, said in a press release.
“It’s almost mind-blowing, as we’re working on the Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return space missions, and this material looks exactly like the material they are collecting,” Russell said. “I’m just speechless with excitement.”
Japanese Hayabusa2 Mission returned approximately 0.16 ounces (4.5 g) from the asteroid Ryugu on Earth in December 2020, and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe collected a large sample of space rock Bennu in October of this year. Bennu’s bits will land here on Earth in September 2023, if all goes according to plan.
The new meteorite was spotted shortly after it fell. Residents of the Winchcombe House saw black spots on their driveway on the morning of March 1, the day after the fireball burst into the English sky. They quickly gathered pieces of the space rock that had made the marks and contacted the UK Meteor Observation Network, who then contacted staff at the Natural History Museum.
“For someone who didn’t really have a clue what it really was, the researcher did a fantastic job collecting it,” Ashley King, another meteorite researcher at the museum, said in the same statement. .
“He wrapped up most of it very quickly on Monday morning, maybe less than 12 hours after the actual event. He then continued to find chunks in his yard over the next few days,” King added. “It looks a bit like charcoal. It’s really black, but it’s a lot softer and is really quite brittle. It’s exciting for us, because this type of meteorite is incredibly rare but contains important clues to our origins.”
The parent bodies of carbonaceous chondrites can reach Earth’s atmosphere at over 240,000 km / h, King said. But the February 28 fireball arrived much slower, at “only” around 50,000 km / h, which is why some pieces of rock survived the fiery ordeal.
“The fact that it goes quite slowly, then that it was recovered so quickly after landing, avoiding any rain that could change its pristine makeup, means that we were really lucky with everything,” he said. -he declares.
A number of fireball cameras captured the February 28 event, allowing researchers to calculate a likely landing zone for the meteorites and determine an approximate trajectory for the parent body. These scans indicate that the object originated from the outer region of the main Asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, scientists said.
More meteorite fragments from the February 28 fireball may be waiting to be found. If you spot something in the Gloucestershire area that you suspect is a space rock, photograph it and record its location, Natural History Museum staff said. Then take a sample using a gloved hand, store the material in foil, and contact the museum.
Mike Wall is the author of “Over there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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