This is the first known carbonaceous chondrite discovered in the UK in 30 years.
For the first time in history, extraterrestrial water has been found in a meteorite that fell in the UK. The cosmic body crashed into a driveway in the Gloucestershire town of Winchcombe in February and is believed to hold clues to where the water in Earth’s vast oceans comes from, Sky News reports.
According to a researcher from the Planetary Materials Group at the Ashley King Museum of Natural History, about 12% of the sample was water.
“The composition of this water is very, very similar to Earth’s oceans. This is really good evidence that asteroids and bodies like Winchcombe have made a very important contribution to Earth’s oceans,” he told the British Science Festival .
The scientist also explained that because half a kilogram of the meteorite was extracted quickly, in about 12 hours, it was not contaminated with water and materials on Earth.
“We always try to match the composition of water meteorites and other extraterrestrial materials with the composition of water on Earth. For most meteorites, the problem is that they are simply contaminated, whereas at Winchcombe we actually know that it’s really not contaminated, so that’s a good thing.” one of our big questions in the planetary sciences is where the water on earth comes from, and one of the visible places is comets with a lot of ice or asteroids ” she added.
At the same time, according to the scientist, the composition of water in Winchcombe is better consistent, which means that the asteroids are 0 carbonaceous and they are probably the main source of water in the inner solar system, on Earth. It is believed to have formed about 4.6 billion years ago and took about 300,000 years to reach Earth. This is the first known carbonaceous chondrite discovered in the UK in 30 years.
Note that there are currently approximately 65,000 known meteorites on Earth.
We remind you, early scientists found previously unseen types of crystals in meteorite dust. They were collected from the dust of the Chelyabinsk meteorite that fell on the territory of Russia nine years ago.
A huge meteorite passed over Scotland
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Source: korrespondent
