The pristine Winchcombe meteorite suggests asteroids from where the earth's water originated.
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20-Nov-2022
- After landing in an English driveway for 12 hours, pieces of the space rock were discovered.
- Winchcombe meteorite fragments were discovered in a field by Scottish researchers from the University of Glasgow.
- The rock's extracts also included extraterrestrial amino acids.
Scientists claim that a meteorite that last year illuminated the sky above a village in England is almost as pure as samples obtained by space probes and has the right kind of hydrogen to explain presence of water on Earth.
On February 28, 2021, a fireball rumbled through the twilight sky over southwest England, sparking a great uproar. The dazzling streak was visible on dozens of meteor cameras and doorbell webcams, and a 1-pound (0.5-kg) piece of the space rock was soon discovered in the driveway of a house in the village of Winchcombe, which later gave the meteorite its name.
The meteorite was only briefly exposed to the elements due to the quick finding, which allowed it to preserve its original chemical makeup.
In fact, the Winchcombe meteorite's composition is so pure that it can almost match samples taken from asteroids in orbit by
space probes like NASA's OSIRIS-REx, experts claimed in a new study. The examination of this priceless rock has produced intriguing findings that seem to confirm the idea that asteroids were the primary source of Earth's water.
The isotopic makeup of the hydrogen atoms in the Winchcombe space rock is quite close to that of the water on Earth. Isotopes are different forms of the same chemical element that differ from one another in terms of the amount of neutrons in their atomic nuclei.
There have been discoveries of water with various isotopic profiles in other potential sources for the water on Earth, such as comets. The investigation also revealed that, in terms of the cosmos, the
meteorite must have separated from its parent asteroid barely 200,000–300,000 years ago. Before they cross paths with
Earth, most meteorites spend millions of years in interplanetary space, where they are subject to solar wind and cosmic ray damage. This is stated by scientists in the paper.
Astronomers were able to reconstruct the Winchcombe meteorite's orbit by examining data from the cameras that recorded the rock's journey through
Earth's atmosphere, and they discovered that its parent asteroid is not among the near-Earth asteroid population
but rather is located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
