Extremely rare meteorite found in spectacular British fireball may contain ‘building blocks of life’

At the end of last month, a fireball illuminated the night sky over the UK and Northern Europe. Now locals are starting to scavenge the remaining meteorite fragments – and scientists say they may contain the “building blocks of life.”

An extremely rare meteorite – found on an unpretentious driveway to a Gloucestershire house – marks the first piece of space rock discovered in the UK in 30 years, the Natural History Museum in London said in a statement on Tuesday. This will give researchers a glimpse of what the solar system looked like when it was formed 4.6 billion years ago.

They nicknamed it the Winchcombe meteorite, for the city where it landed.

The rare find is the result of a fireball spotted on February 28, around 10 p.m., over the western part of the UK. The bright flash lasted for about six seconds, the museum said.

The museum is currently analyzing fragments of the meteorite, which weighs just 10.6 ounces. The special type of meteorite is known as carbonaceous chondrite.

“It’s really exciting,” museum researcher Sara Russell said in a statement. “There are about 65,000 known meteorites all over the world, and of those only 51 of them are carbonaceous chondrites that have been seen falling like this.”

Researchers say the meteorite’s relatively slow speed of around 8 miles per second may be due to the rock’s survival.

“It’s almost unbelievable because we are working on the asteroid sample return space missions Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx, and this material looks exactly like the material they collect, “said Russell.” I’m just speechless with excitement. ”

The man who found the meteorite had missed the entrance to the fireball, and was surprised to wake up with a “black spatter and soot mark” on his driveway. Researchers describe it as resembling charcoal, but feeling much softer and more brittle.

The sample is in such good condition, it is essentially comparable to rock samples space missions.

“For someone who didn’t really have a clue what it really was, the researcher did a fantastic job collecting it,” museum researcher Dr Ashley King said in a statement. “He packed most of it very quickly on Monday morning, maybe less than 12 hours after the actual event. He then continued to find pieces in his yard over the next few days.”

The museum said the rock likely contained soft clay minerals, suggesting it once contained frozen water ice. Carbonaceous chondrites are made up of a combination of minerals and organic compounds, including the building blocks of life – amino acids.

This type of meteorite originates from an asteroid that formed millions of years ago when the planets in our solar system were forming. Scientists believe they have valuable information about our early solar system.

“Meteorites like this are relics of the first solar system, which means they can tell us what planets are made of,” Russell said. “But we also believe that meteorites like this may have brought water to Earth, providing the planet with its oceans.”

A record number of people spotted and reported the fireball, and there was a plethora of doorbell camera footage, dashcam videos, and social media moments to help scientists determine where the meteorite came from. .

The British Fireball Alliance determined that the alien rock zoomed towards Earth from the outer regions of the 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 for the types of experiments they hope to perform on meteorites returned from recent space missions.

“There are so many things that have gone well,” said Russell. “I was a doctoral student when the last British meteorite fell and have been waiting ever since. I always dreamed that there would be carbonaceous chondritis, but you don’t really expect that to happen. It is absolutely a dream to come true. ”