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Tiny meteorite found in Antarctica came from anunknown asteroid
SPACE 24 March 2020
By Leah Crane
We can usually match a meteorite to its asteroid family, but not this timeStocktrek Images, Inc./Alamy
A minuscule meteorite unlike any other we have discovered could help us understand thekinds of rocks that �ll our solar system.
Maitrayee Bose at Arizona State University and her colleagues analysed the chemicals in a 2-millimetre meteorite found in Antarctica, called TAM19B-7. When they looked at the differentcarbon isotopes in the micrometeorite, they were in for a surprise.
“Some of the areas in the micrometeorite have the exact same composition as Earth,” saysBose. “But there were some regions that were carbon-13-rich hotspots, which is something
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that we didn’t expect to �nd at all.”
The team spotted four of these little pockets of heavy carbon. The research was to have beenpresented at the now-cancelled Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas.
Read more: Have we really found an alien protein inside a meteorite?
The oxygen levels in the micrometeorite didn’t match any known asteroid. It is usuallypossible to match a micrometeorite to the asteroid family it belongs to, although not with thissample.
But we know its parent rock contained frozen water because of the abundance of otherisotopes in the micrometeorite, primarily those of oxygen, says Bose.
“It comes from a body that has lots of ice, and when that ice melts it interacts with the rock,”she says. “The question is: can you make important, life-critical compounds by thisinteraction with water?”
On Earth, reactions between water and rocks can form sugars, amino acids and otherchemicals important for life. Finding the micrometeorite’s mysterious parent could help us�gure out if similar activity can occur on asteroids.
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More on these topics: asteroids solar system
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