All posts tagged: meteorite

Meteorite crystals show evidence of hot water on ancient Mars

Meteorite crystals show evidence of hot water on ancient Mars

Published by skeptic

A Martian meteorite nicknamed Black Beauty Carl B. Agee (University of New Mexico) Crystals inside a Martian meteorite hint that there may have been plentiful hot water on Mars when the rock formed 4.45 billion years ago. The rock, nicknamed Black Beauty, was blasted into space by an impact on the surface of Mars before ultimately crashing into the Sahara desert. Much has already been learned about Mars from studying the meteorite, which was discovered in Morocco in 2011 and is formally known as Northwest Africa 7034. Aaron Cavosie at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and his colleagues have spent years studying a tiny fragment of it that includes a zircon crystal measuring 50 micrometres across. Cavosie describes Black Beauty as a “garbage can” rock because it was formed from hundreds of fragments smashed together. “It’s a wonderful buffet of Martian history, a mixture of very old and very young rocks,” he says. “But many of the fragments in it are among the oldest pieces of rock from Mars.” The piece that Cavosie and his …

Swedish landowner can keep meteorite after court battle with geologists | Sweden

Swedish landowner can keep meteorite after court battle with geologists | Sweden

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A Swedish landowner has won a legal battle to keep a 14kg (31lb) meteorite after an appeal court ruled that such rocks should be considered “immovable property” and part of the land where they are found. The land on which the meteorite landed contains iron, which the meteorite is made of. Therefore it “cannot be easily separated from what is usually regarded as (immovable) property”, the Svea court of appeal ruled on Thursday. On 7 November 2020 an iron meteorite fell on the private property in Uppland, north of Stockholm. In December of that year two geologists found it and eventually handed it over to the Swedish Museum of Natural History in the Swedish capital. The Swedish news agency TT said the owner of the private land where it was found, Johan Benzelstierna von Engeström, appealed against a December 2022 ruling by the Uppsala district court. That ruling gave the rock’s finders, Andreas Forsberg and Anders Zetterqvist, the right to the stone because the meteorite was not part of the property, and was a movable …

A single meteorite smashed into Mars and created 2 billion craters

A single meteorite smashed into Mars and created 2 billion craters

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The Martian surface is heavily cratered Stocktrek Images, Inc. / Alamy When a single small meteorite struck Mars a few million years ago, it didn’t just create one crater. It ultimately created billions of them. The main crater, called Corinto, is just under 14 kilometres across, but the debris from that meteorite collision formed about two billion additional craters, called secondaries. When a meteorite slams into the ground, it can blast a huge plume of rocks into the air. When these rocks fall back down, they create their own smaller craters, often in chains and… Source link

Germany had 90 minutes to prepare for a beach ball-sized meteorite impact

Germany had 90 minutes to prepare for a beach ball-sized meteorite impact

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Earth is being pummeled by meteorites daily, but most of its residents aren’t even aware. According to NASA’s planetary defense system Scout, nearly 50 tons of meteoritic matter hit the planet daily. Most small pieces are never found, but occasionally a celestial fireball pushes through the atmosphere and lands on the ground. And on January 21 outside of Berlin, Germany, that’s just what happened. A meteorite on a wayward journey from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter shattered into dozens of pieces—and meteor hunters from around the world mobilized to begin their search. In San Francisco, meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens watched data from Scout as well as the European Space Agency’s Meerkat asteroid guard system, which were tracking the meteorite from Asteroid 2024 Bx1. Jenniskens and colleagues—both professionals and hobbyists—furiously worked to predict where the object would land. Teaming up with Lutz Hecht at the Museum für Naturkunde, he boarded his first of two red eye flights. “I spent my nine hour layover in Newark fruitfully calculating where I expected the meteorites to have fallen,” he says. Once in Germany, they went directly to …

Winchcombe meteorite uncovers clues about early Solar System

Winchcombe meteorite uncovers clues about early Solar System

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Scientists have used powerful microscopes to discover chemical and molecular fingerprints of the early Solar System inside the recently recovered Winchcombe meteorite. Meteorites like Winchcombe represent the building blocks of our Solar System, providing key insights into the ingredients from which the planets, including Earth, are formed. A rare group of meteorites, called carbonaceous meteorites, are rich in chemical species such as carbon and nitrogen and likely played a critical role in delivering water and organic molecules to the early Earth. The findings, ‘High-spatial resolution functional chemistry of nitrogen compounds in the observed UK meteorite fall Winchcombe,’ are detailed in a paper in Nature Communications. What can the Winchcombe meteorite tell us about the early Solar System? Winchcombe is a carbonaceous meteorite that was widely observed to fall in the UK in February 2021, with the first samples collected only around 12 hours after landing. Therefore, it offers scientists an opportunity to investigate the composition of organic matter in the early Solar System without the severe terrestrial alteration effects that usually compromise investigations of meteorites. …

‘Star Wars meteorite’ sheds light on the early Solar System

‘Star Wars meteorite’ sheds light on the early Solar System

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Locals watched in awe as a fireball exploded and hundreds of meteorite fragments rained down on the city of Tatahouine, Tunisia, on June 27, 1931. Fittingly, the city later became a major filming location of the Star Wars movie series. The desert climate and traditional villages became a huge inspiration to the director, George Lucas, who proceeded to name the fictional home planet of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader “Tatooine”. The mysterious 1931 meteorite, a rare type of achondrite (a meteorite that has experienced melting) known as a diogenite, is obviously not a fragment of Skywalker’s home planet. But it was similarly named after the city of Tatahouine. Now, a recent study has gleaned important insights into the the origin of the meteorite – and the early Solar System. Lucas filmed various scenes for Star Wars in Tatahouine. These include Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) and Star Wars: Episode 2 – Attack of the Clones (2002). Various famous scenes were filmed there, including scenes …

A brief history of the UK’s Winchcombe meteorite

A brief history of the UK’s Winchcombe meteorite

Published by skeptic

On 28 February 2021, for the first time in 30 years, a meteorite fell in the UK and was later recovered by scientists. Today, there’s an international effort to study this space rock and learn more about its place in the early solar system. This meteorite is named after Winchcombe, the town in Gloucestershire where several fragments were recovered – including a piece that landed on the driveway of a family home. The meteorite formed 4.5 billion years ago in the distant outer solar system, beyond the orbit of Jupiter. We refer to such objects as primitive because they contain some of the earliest solid material to form in our cosmic neighbourhood, offering insights into a time when our solar system was in its infancy. Over time, much of this solid material merged to form larger objects, which eventually led to the emergence of planets. Some of the early building blocks that avoided being consumed in this process of planetary assembly are present today as asteroids or even smaller objects. The Winchcombe meteorite is just …