Scientists have discovered extraterrestrial water in a meteorite that fell in a residential area of Wichcombe, England. This is the first time in history that scientists have detected water from another planet.
The meteorite that fell in England in February was the first known carbonaceous chondritis to be found. UK, the first recovery in the entire country in 30 years. It is believed to have formed about 4.6 billion years ago and took about 300,000 years to reach Earth.
Since the origin of liquid on our planet is still a matter of debate among scientists and one of the hypotheses is that water came here via comets, this discovery will enable new research that may provide valuable information about the origin of water on Earth. Asteroids that brought her.
The piece of space rock was collected 12 hours after it fell — making the sample sterile, preventing contamination — and contains 12% water in its composition.
“This is the best evidence that asteroids have made a very important contribution to Earth’s oceans,” Ashley King, a researcher in the Planetary Materials Group at the Natural History Museum, said in a statement.
In an interview with Sky News, King added that “one of the big questions we have in planetary science is where did water come from on Earth” and that “one of the obvious places is thought to be through comets with loads and loads”. ice or asteroids”.
The Winchcombe model doesn’t provide definitive answers, but it does help us understand how much water may have been transported by meteorites that fell on Earth in the past.
Other recent discoveries indicate that in addition to water, debris from space may have brought adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine, and uracil, the nucleobases that make up the DNA and RNA of life on our planet.
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