Last month, amazing view fireball the night sky lit up over the United Kingdom and Northern Europe. Now, locals are starting to recover leftover meteorite fragments – and scientists say they may be “building blocks of life.”
A rare meteorite – found on the tragic pavement of a house in Gloucestershire – marks the first piece of space rock found in the UK in 30 years, the Museum of Natural History in London said in reported Tuesday. It will give researchers a closer look at what the solar system looked like when it was forming, about 4.6 billion years ago.
They are nicknamed Winchcombe meteorite, for the town where it landed.
The rare find is the result of a fireball seen on February 28, around 10pm, over the west coast of the UK The blaze lasted about six seconds, the museum said.
The museum is now analyzing fragments of the meteorite, weighing just 10.6 ounces. A special type of meteorite is called a carbonaceous chondrite.
“This is very interesting,” said museum researcher Sara Russell in a statement. “There are approximately 65,000 known meteorites worldwide, of which only 51 are carbonaceous chondrites observed. falling like this one. ”
UK Fire Brigade Federation
Researchers say the meteorite’s average slow speed may be around 8 miles per second thanks to rock survival.
“‘It’ s almost mind – boggling, because we’re working on asteroid sample return missions Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx, and this material looks just like the material they’re collecting, “Russell said.” I’m just speechless with pleasure. ”
The man who found the meteorite had entered the fireball, and was surprised to wake up to a “black, sooty splatter signal” on his driveway. Researchers say it looks like coal, but feels much softer and more fragile.
The sample is in such good condition, it’s pretty much like rock samples from the space missions.
“For someone who had no real idea what it was, the finder did an admirable job in collecting it,” Dr. Ashley King, a researcher at the museum, said in a statement. “He put most of it up quickly on Monday morning, probably less than 12 hours after the incident itself. He then continued to search for pieces in his garden over the past few days.”
The museum said the rock appears to contain soft clay minerals, suggesting that there was once frozen water ice. Carbonaceous chondrites are composed of a mixture of minerals and organic fertilizers, including building blocks of life – amino acids.
This type of meteorite comes from an asteroid 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.
Trustees of the Natural History Museum
“Meteorites like this are memories from the early Solar System, which means they can tell us where the planets are made of,” Russell said. “But we also think that meteorites may have like water to the Earth, bringing oceans to the planet. ”
Most people saw and described the fireball, and there were plenty of doorbell photographs, dashcam videos and social media moments to help scientists determine where it came from. the meteorite came.
The UK Fire Brigade determined the outer rock that was transferred to Earth from the outer regions of the asteroid belt – located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
So many space rocks have been recovered, that researchers can use the samples as a kind of test run for the types of experiments they hope to perform on meteorites returned from recent space missions. .
“There are so many things that went right,” said Russell. “I was a PhD student when the last meteorite fell in the UK and I’ve been waiting ever since. I always thought it would be carbonaceous chondrite, but you don’t expect that to happen at all. It’s an absolute dream. come to fruition. ”