Arecibo observatory scientists help unravel surprise asteroid mystery miragenews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from miragenews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
LUXEMBOURG, June 15, 2022 /PRNewswire/ Asteroid Day events are scheduled around the globe after two years of mostly digital events and programming. These events are largely independently
Científico de origen venezolano ayudó a la NASA a cazar un asteroide eluniverso.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eluniverso.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Icy asteroids?
The parent asteroids of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites are likely frozen mud balls – similar to the comets that Harvard astronomer Fred Whipple described, and demonstrated in class with a 200kg dirty snowball.
Stony meteorites known as carbonaceous chondrites show signs of liquid water no more than a million years ago, scientists say.
This is a startling discovery, because carbonaceous chondrites are believed to be chips blown off the surfaces of ancient asteroids whose composition hasn’t altered since the dawn of the Solar System, 4.5 billion years ago.
And while planetary scientists have long suspected that these asteroids once contained water, they didn’t know whether that water still persists in the form of ice or was long ago lost to space, says Simon Turner, an isotope geochemist at Macquarie University in Australia