Image: Natural History Museum, London/Exhibition
A meteorite found on a sidewalk in Winchcombe, England, may provide clues about the formation of Earth’s oceans. Because a British scientist claims that a sample of space material is 12% extraterrestrial water.
The sample was collected in February last year, about 12 hours after the 500-gram meteorite crashed. According to Ashley King, a researcher in the Planetary Materials Group at the Natural History Museum in London, the sample is a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite that has not been contaminated by water and other materials on Earth.
In general, these types of meteorites are rare and brittle, and may contain water in their composition or even water-altered minerals. According to Sky NewsThis For the first time such a meteorite has been discovered in England.
In an interview, King said the composition of the water embedded in the meteorite’s minerals is very similar to that of our planet’s oceans. The researcher explains that the discovery proves that asteroids must have contributed to the formation of Earth’s oceans.
Most of Earth’s water is on extraterrestrials
Currently, there is a debate about the origin of water on our planet. When Earth formed, the region closest to the Sun was too hot for water to remain stable. Furthermore, the solar system’s nebula contains only 21 parts per million of hydrogen, too little to supply most of Earth’s water.
This means that ocean water could have been “imported” here only after Earth and the interior of the solar system began to cool. Watery bodies must have formed far from the Sun and then been thrown toward Earth by the gravitational pull of outer planets such as Jupiter or Saturn.
In the past, comets were thought to be a source of water. However, recent research shows that falling carbonaceous asteroids must have been the planet’s main water source.
Impacts of comets — large balls of ice — contributed part of the planet’s water, as space probes that visited Halley in 1986, or 7P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014, demonstrated the composition of water. Comets are different from those found in oceans.
Based on these data, a study published in 2018 Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, it is estimated that only one or two for every 100 water molecules present on Earth must have come from the original nebula. The rest may have originated from asteroids.
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