Revealing the origin of most meteorites on Earth



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July 3, 2018, 13:37 Washington, July 3 (Prensa Latina) US scientists discovered that most of the 200,000 bodies of the inner asteroid belt came from the destruction of six planets during the childhood of the Solar System, publishes today the magazine Nature Astronomy.

Asteroids are spinning very fast near the Earth, raising concern about how many exist and what kind of materials are made up, said Stanley Dermott, director of research and scientific of the University of Florida

This is one of the reasons why scholars attempt to trace the origin of bodies in the asteroid belt. For this reason, they first focused on the families of these rocks, but the impacts of the bodies and the gravitational influence of other objects eventually diverted them.

For this reason, the Dermott team proposed to focus their research on asteroids, the region of this ring closest to Mars and located from 2.1 to 2.5 astronomical units (distance between the Earth and the Sun, on average, 150 billion kilometers).

The experts felt that Many asteroids present in this region do not belong to any known family, but have other origins.

However, after analyzing the variations of the orbit and its inclination, in addition to combining them with data on its luminosity, they observed that these objects of the inner belt have a behavior similar to that of the others. areas, suggesting that the origin of the other is similar.

Dermott 's results then show that almost all terrestrial meteorites come from a few precursors, which is interesting to understand how the Earth formed and from where came the materials that made it. have shaped.

The discovery also allows us to better study the formation of Earth-like rock planets in other stars, and provides useful information on the evolution and composition of asteroids.

According to scientists, this research is crucial to protect the planet against the impacts of asteroids that will occur in the future. . Some of them, thrown into the vicinity of the Earth by collision of rocks or by the interactions of the gravity of the planets, can be important and cause powerful explosions.

ocs / lrc

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