by Fragments of an asteroid that exploded over Germany on January 21 and were recovered five days later have been confirmed to be a rare type of space rock that could help shed light on the origins of the Earth.
As Space.com first reported on February 1, scientists suspected that the strange appearance of the meteorite fragments from the parent asteroid 2024 BX1 indicated that they were part of a rare group called aubrites. Those suspicions have now been confirmed.
SETI Institute meteorologist Peter Jenniskens was part of the team that discovered some of the meteorites. He told Space.com that only 11 previous examples of an obtuse meteorite falling on Earth have been found. The extremely rare examples are from a family believed to represent less than 1% of known meteorites.
Related: How NASA predicted the January 21 asteroid crash over Germany
The aubrite meteorites from 2024 BX1 differ from other meteorites because they have a translucent glassy crust rather than a thick crust of black glass, and they look like gray granite. So it was difficult at first to differentiate them from standard Earth rocks.
But Jenniskens and colleagues at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin performed the first examinations of one of these meteorite pieces with an electron beam microprobe, confirming that they have the mineral and chemical composition typical of aubrite rocks.
“The interesting thing about this fall is that we have a very nice orbit on it, so there are clues in the shape of the orbit itself as to where the source region was for these meteorites,” Jenniskens said. “They probably came from inside the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That’s probably where there’s a lot of debris, a collision that created a lot of smaller pieces called an asteroid family.”
Meteorites are central to its past and its future
Main belt asteroids like 2024 BX1 were formed around the same time as the planets of the solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago, from material around the infant sun that was not used up by planet formation.
That means because they are not affected by geological processes, they give scientists a glimpse into the building blocks of the planets, especially the rocky life of the solar system within Mercury, Venus, Mars, and of course Earth.
Jenniskens added that, like aubrites, these meteorites have properties very similar to those of Earth, such as the ratio of water to the ratio of other chemicals. This means that studying these samples provides an opportunity to investigate the type of material that went into the formation of our planet around 4.5 billion years ago.
“It’s very cool. We have new material to look at that could be the building blocks from which the Earth was created. And so that’s the appeal of this particular meteorite,” said Jenniskens.
Studying the remains of asteroid 2024 BX1 may be important not only for understanding Earth’s history but also for protecting the future of humanity.
Asteroid 2024 BX1 was first spotted by astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky at the Konkoly Observatory in Hungary. It was tracked by NASA’s Near-Earth Asteroid Scout and the European Space Agency’s Meerkat Asteroid Guard impact hazard assessment systems, both of which predicted it would hit Earth.
The tiny asteroid, which was no more than 3.3-feet (1-meter) wide and may have been one of the smallest space rocks ever detected before hitting Earth, erupted in the atmosphere over Munich, Germany, creating a bright fireball visible across Europe. .
This explosion could help scientists better understand asteroid strikes, according to Jenniskens. This is because space rocks that erupt on Earth like this are usually much larger, like the 59-foot-wide (18-meter) Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Russia’s southern Ural region on February 15, 2013. .
“Here we have the opportunity to see how a small asteroid behaves when it enters the Earth’s atmosphere,” Jenniskens. said. “We can see how it is fragmented in a very interesting way that deserves much more study. Therefore, it may be possible to guide forecasts on the height that something more fragmented above the Earth.”
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The SETI scientist says this could help us prepare for strikes from smaller asteroids by helping us predict where on Earth their wreckage will fall after they explode.
These results for specific acoustic meteorites have been submitted to the Meteorological Society’s International Nomenclature Commission on February 2, 2024, for examination and confirmation.
