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Earth has managed to avoid any truly catastrophic impact of objects in space for some time, but that does not mean that the materials of the cosmos do not rain regularly on our world. Scientists regularly observe rocks of different sizes crossing the Earth's atmosphere.
Most of the time, the materials that make their way to the ground are similar to those that make up our planet and most of the others in our solar system, but a new study published in Letters of physical examination reveals that materials outside our system have also accumulated on our planet.
The researchers traveled to Antarctica and brought back more than 300 kg of fresh snow collected on the surface. Once the melt melted, the team examined what types of particles remained, trying to paint a clearer picture of the type of dust and debris settling even on the most remote surfaces of the planet.
The team found something quite surprising: an abundance of iron in a particularly rare, scanty form on Earth. It is iron 60 and, even though it is in the earth's crust, iron 60 buried on our planet was deposited millions of years ago, which means it should not appear in the freshly fallen snow in Antarctica.
So how did he get there? After taking into account the potential terrestrial sources of iron 60 – including nuclear reactors and tests – the team has reduced the possibilities. They now believe that the material was transported to Earth via interstellar objects that entered our solar system and ultimately collided with the Earth.
We often think that meteors are huge objects that produce a fireball in the sky, but objects in space come in all shapes and sizes and even the smallest fragments of material can contribute to their accumulation in the weather. The researchers believe that the material is probably coming from a supernova that has projected rare iron into space and that our solar system is going through a cloud of this material as we speak.
Image Source: NASA / ESA
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