Suara.com – Every year, the Earth is exposed to dust from comet and asteroids. These interplanetary dust particles pass through the atmosphere and cause the effect of shooting stars. Some of them reach the surface in shape micrometeorite.
According to research in an international program carried out for nearly 20 years by scientists from CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, and the National Museum of Natural History, reveals that 5,200 tonnes of these micrometeorites fall to the surface per year.
Reporting from Science Daily, Tuesday (13/4/2021), the study will be available in the journal Earth & Planetary Science Letters starting April 15.
Micrometeorites always fall on Earth. These interplanetary dust particles from comets or asteroids are particles several tenth to one hundredth of a millimeter in size, which have passed through the atmosphere and reached the surface of the Earth.
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To collect and analyze these micrometeorites, six expeditions led by Jean Duprat, a researcher at CNRS, have been carried out over the past two decades near the Franco-Italian Concordia (Dome C) station, which is located 1,100 kilometers in the heart of Antarctica.
Dome C is an ideal collection point because of the low level of snow accumulation and almost no terrestrial dust.
This expedition collected enough space particles ranging in size from 30 to 200 micrometers, to measure their annual flux, which corresponds to the mass that increases on Earth per square meter per year.
If these results were applied to Earth-wide, the total annual flux of the micrometeorite would be 5,200 tonnes per year.
This dust is the main source of extraterrestrial matter on Earth, far above larger objects such as meteorites, whose flux is less than ten tonnes per year.
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Comparison of the predicted and predicted micrometeorite fluxes confirms that 80 percent of the micrometeorites likely came from comets and the rest from asteroids.
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