Astronomers reconstructed the 22 meter flight of an asteroid that exploded through the Solar System and exploded over it. Botswana, Meteor shower fell in the Kalahari Desert.
This is the first time scientists have traced space rock to its source – in this case Vesta, one of the largest objects in the sun-orbiting asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars.
The six-tonne asteroid penetrated Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 37,000 mph in June 2018 and cleaved through the Central Kalahari Reserve, causing a fireball with the same brightness as the Sun. An instant search of the landing site was supposed to find a tiny meteor named Motopi Pan.
NASA researchers tracked dangerous objects from far to the moon using telescopes in Arizona and Hawaii. After the collision, they asked astronomers in Australia to verify the image Telescope SkyMapper In New South Wales – used to study black holes and the like – if they also captured the asteroid’s flight path. To the surprise of the researchers.
“We wouldn’t have realized that if it weren’t for the American explorer, he was close to home,” said Christian Wolff, an astronomer at the Australian National University. “Yes, this is the Kalahari and I have never visited it before, but when your day-to-day work involves driving along a series of black holes with an average step size of one billion light years between waypoints, the Kalahari feels very close. to the keyboard. “
The asteroid recording, called 2018LA, from three telescopes positioned across the Earth’s surface allows astronomers to reconstruct the rocky trajectory and determine its origin. The trail leads to Vesta, a 300 mile wide asteroid that can sometimes be seen without a telescope.
Armed with a good idea of the asteroid’s trajectory, scientists can improve its landing site in a nature reserve. This led to an expedition that found more than 20 other meteors scattered over 3 Earth miles.
The mineralogical analysis of the fragments suggests that the rock mass that turned into 2018LA was originally buried deep beneath Vesta’s surface but was thrown into space during the impact leaving a crater on an asteroid about 22 million years ago.
The ejected space rock wanders through the solar system, its surface is exposed to cosmic rays, until it falls into Earth’s gravitational embrace and falls to the ground.
Laboratory tests have shown that the oldest grains in meteorites found date from 4.56 billion years ago, when the solar system was still formed from a very hot disk of gas and interstellar dust. Details were posted on Meteorites and Planetary Sciences.
“This is a very interesting study,” said Ashley King, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum who was not involved in the work. “This is the second time a rock has been found in space before entering Earth’s atmosphere and eventually ending up as a meteorite on Earth.”
He said the rock found was a mix of volcanic meteorite species known as HED, short for Howardite, Eucret and Diogenes, which have long been thought to be fragments of the asteroid Vesta. Is an asteroid The NASA mission visited him at dawn A few years ago.
“Because the team tracked the rock from outer space to the site of the collision, they were able to calculate a very accurate orbit that matches an origin near Vista, providing one of the best connections we have between an asteroid and a meteorite,” said King. it is very important to understand the history of our solar system. “
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