Meteorite shares its secrets

A pristine, 12 million–year-old meteorite

that crashed into Michigan in 2018 contains thousands of ancient organic compounds, scientists have revealed. By the time most meteorites are recovered and analyzed, their chemical makeup has been altered by interactions with elements here on Earth, reports CNN.com. But chunks of this meteorite were large enough to be tracked by weather radars, and—two days after it lit up the Michigan sky—a piece of it was found on the frozen surface of Strawberry Lake near the town of Hamburg. “We could see the minerals weren’t much altered,” says study lead author Philipp Heck, from the University of Chicago. The 2,600 organic compounds that cover the space rock interest scientists because meteorites may have been responsible for delivering the building blocks of life to Earth. An analysis of the Hamburg meteorite suggests it broke off from a parent asteroid that formed 4.5 billion years ago—a mere 20 million years after the formation of the solar system. “Every meteorite that falls to Earth is worth studying,” Heck says, because it may shed light on “our origins.”