Meteorite gives up secrets to Scottish researchers
SCIENTISTS at a Scottish university have helped to unlock new secrets of a meteorite that crashed to Earth in a field of sheep.
They led a team that found the Winchcombe space rock had been smashed apart and rebuilt over and over again as it endured a brutal journey through space.
The meteorite, which landed in Gloucestershire, was the first to be found on UK soil for 30 years. The first rock was discovered on a driveway in
February 2021 after it was spotted as a fireball streaking across the skies.
More fragments were found a few days later in a field where sheep were grazing.
The new analysis also suggests water may have played a role in its violent odyssey that lasted millions of years.
Researchers said that in its early days it was an ice-bearing dry rock but over millions of years the ice melted into a ball of mud which was repeatedly broken apart and reassembled.
Findings suggest it formed from chunks of other rocks cemented together – like broken pieces from multiple jigsaws mashed together – in what is known as breccia.
Dr Luke Daly, of the University of Glasgow, who led the research, said: “We were fascinated to uncover just how fragmented the breccia was within the Winchcombe sample we analysed.
“If you imagine the meteorite as a jigsaw, what we saw in the analysis was as if each of the jigsaw pieces themselves had also been cut into smaller pieces, and then jumbled in a bag filled with fragments of seven other jigsaws.
“However, what we’ve uncovered in trying to unjumble the jigsaws through our analyses is new insight into the very fine detail of how the rock was altered by water in space.
“It also gives us a clearer idea of how it must have been battered by impacts and reformed again and again over the course of its lifetime since it swirled together out of the solar nebula, a giant interstellar cloud that gave birth to the solar system, billions of years ago.”
The Winchcombe meteorite belongs to a rare class of rocks known as carbonaceous chondrites. They comprise about 3% of all meteorites collected on Earth and are thought to contain unaltered chemicals from the formation of the solar system more than four billion years ago.
Analysis of those minerals could help scientists find the answers to questions such as how did the solar system evolve and how did Earth get its water.
A team of international researchers collaborated on the study, published in the journal Meteoritics And Planetary Science.