by Locals were shocked when a fireball exploded and hundreds of meteorite fragments rained down on the city of Tatahouine, Tunisia, on June 27, 1931. Fittingly, the city later became a major filming location for the Star Wars film series. that. The desert climate and traditional villages were a major inspiration for the director, George Lucas, who named the fictional home planet of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader “Tatooine”.
The mysterious meteorite of 1931 is clearly not a fragment of Skywalker’s home planet, which is a rare type of achondrite (a meteorite that has experienced melting) called a digenite. But it was also named after the city of Tatahouine. Now, a recent study has yielded important insights into the origin of the meteorite – and soon the Solar System.
Lucas filmed various scenes for Star Wars in Tatahouine. These include Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) and Star Wars: Episode 2 – Attack of the Clones (2002). Various famous films were made there, including scenes of “Mos Espa” and “Mos Eisley Cantina”.
Mark Hamill, the actor who played Luke Skywalker, recalled filming in Tunisia and discussed it with Empire Magazine: “If you could go inside your own mind, the crew would stop and look at the sky, you really felt like you were being transported to another world”.
Composition and origin
Diogenites, named after the Greek philosopher Diogenes, are rocky meteorites (rocks solidified by lava or magma). They formed deep within an asteroid and cooled slowly, resulting in relatively large crystals.
Tatahouine is no exception, containing crystals as large as 5mm with black veins cutting across the entire sample. The black veins are known as shock-induced melt veins, and are the result of high temperatures and pressures caused by a missile smashing into the surface of the meteorite’s parent body.
The presence of these veins and the structure of pyroxene grains (minerals containing calcium, magnesium, iron, and aluminum) indicate that the sample has experienced pressures of up to 25 gigapascals (GPa). To put that into perspective, the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of our ocean, is only 0.1 GPa. So it’s safe to say that this sample had a pretty big impact.
By assessing the spectrum (light reflected from their surface, broken down by wavelength) of meteorites and comparing it to asteroids and planets in our Solar System, it has been suggested that bigenites, including Tatahouine, from the second largest asteroid in our asteroid belt. , called 4 Vesta.
This asteroid has interesting and exciting information about the early solar system. Many of the meteorites from 4 Vesta are ancient, around ~4 billion years. As such, they provide a window into past Solar System events that we cannot observe here on Earth.
A violent past
The recent study investigated 18 binaries, including Tatahouine, all from 4 Vesta. The authors applied “radiometric argon-argon age dating” techniques to determine the ages of the meteorites. This is based on looking at two different isotopes (versions of elements that have more or less particles called neutrons). We know that certain isotopes of argon increase in samples as they age at a known rate, which helps scientists estimate the age of a sample by comparing the ratio of two different isotopes.
The team also evaluated deformation caused by collisions, known as impact events, using an electron microscope-type technique called electron backscatter diffraction.
By combining age dating and microscopy techniques, the authors were able to map the timing of impact events on 4 Vesta and the early Solar System. The study suggests that 4 Vesta had continuous impact events until 3.4 billion years ago when a catastrophic one occurred.
The result of this catastrophic event, possibly another asteroid collision, was the production of smaller debris pile asteroids called “vestoids”. When such large-scale impact events are resolved, the hostile nature of the early Solar System is revealed.
There have been further collisions of these small bodies that have thrown matter into Earth over the past 50 to 60 million years – including the Tunisian fireball.
Ultimately, this work shows the importance of investigating meteorites – impacts played a major role in the evolution of asteroids in our Solar System.
Read more: A ‘Star Wars’ planet with two suns: a step towards Luke Skywalker’s Tatooine
This article from The Conversation is republished under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Ben Rider-Stokes receives funding from STFC.
