The Winchcombe meteorite detached from a larger asteroid passing between Mars and Jupiter.
A meteorite that crashed in the UK town of Winchcombe last year contained water that almost perfectly matched that of Earth.
This reinforces the idea that rocks from space brought key chemical components, including water, to the planet early in its history, billions of years ago.
The meteorite is considered the most important recovered in the United Kingdom.
The scientists who published the first detailed analysis say that has thrown up some fascinating insights.
More than 500g of blackened remains were collected from the local gardens and fields where it fell, following a Giant fireball will light up the night sky.
The shredded remains were carefully cataloged at the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London and then loaned out to teams from all over Europe to investigate.
And the fact that the parts of the meteorite will recover less than 12 hours later of crashing means that it had absorbed very little terrestrial water, or indeed any contaminants.
“Every other meteorite has been compromised in some way by the terrestrial environment,” study co-author Ashley King of the NHM told BBC News.
But Winchcombe’s is different because the speed with which it was picked up.
“This means that when we looked at it, we knew that the composition we’re looking at takes us back to the composition at the beginning of the Solar System, 4.6 billion years ago.”
“Excluding the search for rock samples from an asteroid with a spacecraft, we mightn’t have a more pristine specimen.”
Scientists who examined the carbon- and nitrogen-containing organic compounds of the meteorite, including its amino acids, obtained an equally clean image.
This is the kind of chemistry that might have been the raw material that allowed biology to begin on Earth primitive.
The new analysis also confirms the origin of the meteorite.
precise trajectory
Camera images of the fireball have allowed researchers to determine a very precise trajectory.
calculating backwards, They found out that the meteorite came from the outer asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The Winchcombe material recently sold at auction for more than 120 times its weight in gold.
Further investigation revealed that it broke off from a larger asteroid, presumably in some collision.
Later, it took between 200,000 to 300,000 years to reach Earthas revealed by the number of particular atoms, such as neon, created in the meteorite material through the constant irradiation of high-speed space particles, or cosmic rays.
“0.2-0.3 million years seems like a long time, but from a geological perspective, it’s actually very fastsaid Helena Bates, from the NHM.
“The carbonaceous chondrites have to get here quickly or they won’t survive, because they’re so crumbly, they’d just break off.”
The scientists’ first analysis, in this week’s issue of the journal Science Advances, is just an overview of the Winchcombe meteorite’s properties.
A dozen articles will be published soon more on specialist topics in an issue of the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.
And even they won’t be the last word.
“Researchers will continue to work on this sample for years to come, revealing more secrets regarding the origins of our Solar System,” said study co-author Luke Daly of the University of Glasgow.
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