The Carbon rich asteroids they are a lot abundant in space, nevertheless the meteorites of this type constitute just the 5% of those fallen on earth: This longtime mystery has now been resolved, thanks to the study published in the magazine Nature Astronomy and led by the Astronomical Observatory of Paris. THE managers of this strangeness they are the Sun and the terrestrial atmospherewho act like a gigantic filter: asteroids containing a lot carbon I am in fact more fragileand therefore tend to do not survive neither to the impact with the atmosphere nor to the heat of our star when they pass nearby.
The discovery also throws new light on the origin of life on earth: this kind of meteorites, in fact, is particularly important because it contains organic water and molecules, key ingredients for the birth of the first organisms. “We had been suspected for some time that the fragile carbon material did not survive the entrance to the atmosphere – says Hadrien Devillepoix of the Australian Curtin University, among the authors of the study led by Patrick Shobber – but what this research demonstrates is that many of these meteoroids do not even come there: they crushed due to the repeated heating they undergo when they pass near the sun. DEVILLEPOIX continues – they are then more likely to resist the Earth’s atmosphere “.
The resolution of the enigma is due to the wider and complete study of its kind: the researchers analyzed about 8,500 meteoroids And related impactsusing the data from 19 observation networks scattered in 39 countries. The results also show that when the asteroids are disintegrated by the close encounters with the planets, they generate particularly fragile meteoroids that almost never survive the passage in the atmosphere of our planet. “This discovery could influence the future missions on asteroids – says Shobber – and the impact risks assessments “.
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