A recent study revealed that the rocky body that produced the asteroid Ryugu, may be unprecedented porous, and the new discovery highlights how planets form in the solar system, the most common type of asteroids found in the outer main asteroid belt is carbon asteroids or type C And, previous research indicated that it is a relic of the early solar system that carries tons of primitive materials from the nebula that gave birth to the sun and its planets.
According to the American “space” website, this makes searching for Type C asteroids necessary when it comes to understanding the formation of planets.
However, much remains unknown about the physical properties of type C asteroids, the carbon chondrites meteorites believed to originate from these asteroids often fail to survive as the Earth’s atmosphere enters.
The researchers photographed the surface of the asteroid thermally to learn more information about the asteroid, and although they expected the rocks to be more dense and therefore cooler than their surroundings, they suddenly found that the surface of the rocks was dominated by rocks that were almost at the same temperature, which Indicates that they have pores of about 30% to 50%.
This was consistent with images from the roaming explorer that showed that most of the rocks had crumbly surfaces.
“Even the 100-meter-long rocks found porous and fragile materials,” said study leader Tatsuaki Okada, a planetary scientist at the Japan Aerospace and Space Institute of Sagamihara in Japan.
Scientists saw several dense rocks interspersed with porous rocks which were almost as dense as carbon carbon meteorites.
This prompted researchers to suspect that when meteorites from Type C asteroids fall to Earth, the fragmented rocks that make up most of these asteroids decompose upon entry, with only the denser material remaining.
These results indicate that Ryugu had a pile of rubble consisting of fragments of an object that was 30% to 50% porous.
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