Jakarta –
Fragments of an asteroid exploded in Germany on January 21, 2024. The fragments were discovered five days later and confirmed to be a rare type of space rock that could help explain the origins of the earth.
Scientists previously thought that meteorite fragments from the parent asteroid 2024 BX1 indicated the object was part of a rare group called aubrites. These suspicions have now been confirmed.
SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens was part of the team that discovered some of these meteorites. He told Space.com that previously, only 11 examples of aubrite meteorite falls had been found on Earth.
The aubrite meteorite from 2024 BX1 differs from other meteorites in that it has a translucent glass crust, rather than a thick black glass crust, and has the appearance of gray granite. This makes them initially difficult to distinguish from ordinary Earth rocks.
However, Jenniskens and collaborators at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin conducted the first examination of one of the meteorite pieces with an electron beam microprobe, and determined that the piece had the mineralogy and chemical composition typical of aubrite-type rocks.
“They most likely came from the deep part of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That’s a place where there might be a lot of debris, collisions that created a lot of small pieces called asteroid families,” Jenniskens said.
Main belt asteroids like 2024 BX1 formed around the same time as the planets of the solar system. So it was formed about 4.5 billion years ago from material around the baby sun, which was not consumed by the formation of the planets.
This means that, because it is not affected by geological processes, scientists get a glimpse of the materials that make up planets, especially the rocky planets in the inner solar system, namely Mercury, Venus, Mars, and of course Earth.
Jenniskens added that as an aubrite, this meteorite has properties that are very similar to Earth, such as the ratio of water and the ratio of other chemicals. Studying these samples offers the opportunity to investigate the types of materials that played a role in the formation of our planet some 4.5 billion years ago.
Studying the remnants of asteroid 2024 BX1 may not only be important in understanding Earth’s past but also in safeguarding humanity’s future.
Asteroid 2024 BX1 was first discovered by astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky at the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary. The asteroid was then tracked by NASA’s Near-Earth Asteroid Scout and the European Space Agency’s Meerkat Asteroid Guard, both of which predicted that the asteroid would indeed hit Earth.
These explosions could help scientists better understand asteroid strikes, according to Jenniskens. Because space rocks that erupt above Earth like this are usually much larger in size.
Quoted from Space.com, the findings regarding this particular aubrite meteorite have now been submitted to the International Nomenclature Commission of the Meteoritical Society on February 2, 2024, for examination and confirmation.
Watch the video “Scientists in England Start Examining Samples of the Asteroid Bennu”
(nah/nwk)
2024-02-15 03:30:00
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