Author: Emily Conover / Source: Science News for Students
A space rock that fell to Earth a decade ago may once have been part of a planet. It would have been a planet that met its end in the solar system’s early days, new data indicate.
Inside this meteorite, scientists found tiny pockets of iron and sulfur. They were wrapped in diamonds. Those crystal gems formed under high pressure, the researchers say — likely inside a planet the size of Mercury or Mars.There’s also a second newfound space oddity. Scientists have been studying a renegade asteroid that travels in a strange direction. They now report that this space rock appears to have been born somewhere outside our solar system.
The new observations come from a pair of new papers.
Let’s start with the gem-studded meteorite. It’s parent no longer exists. It likely would have been a protoplanet — a moon- to Mars-sized celestial “embryo” that could have helped build a true planet through a series of energetic collisions. But in that process, the meteorite’s parent appears to have been smashed to smithereens. It would have been long ago — in those violent early days of our solar system’s formation.
“We probably have in our hands a piece of one of these first planets that have disappeared,” says Philippe Gillet. He’s a geophysicist in Switzerland who works at a research institute and university. It’s known as EPFL. That’s short for École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne.
Along with his colleagues, including EPFL physicist Farhang Nabiei, Gillet analyzed tiny rock fragments. The pieces came from the Almahata Sitta meteorites. These meteorites are famous because they are parts of the first asteroid that scientists tracked all the way from space to their crash-landing on Earth. This asteroid streaked across the Nubian desert in Sudan in 2008.
Almahata Sitta meteorites are a type called ureilites (Yu-ree-AY-leits). Their makeup differs from any of the known stony planets in our solar system. Inside these ureilites are very small diamonds.
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Diamonds are crystals made of pure carbon. They can form from a powerful collision. Or they can form in a dense environment where pressures are very high, such as inside a space rock. The width of diamonds inside the meteorites was only about 100 micrometers (about four thousandths of an inch). But that still made them too large to have been formed by two ordinary asteroids colliding. Such diamonds…
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