Astro Blog

By Amanda Holpuch , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A couple in Canada were returning home from walking their dogs some months ago when they found a burst of dusty debris on their walkway. They turned to their security-camera footage for answers and found it showed a mysterious puff of smoke appearing on the tidy walkway where the mystery splotch was. The source of the splotch was officially registered  on Monday  as the Charlottetown meteorite, named after the city on Prince Edward Island, in eastern Canada, where it landed....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/science/meteorite-debris-security-camera-canada.html . [includes video of the camera] 

By Katherine Kornei , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: In 2011, a striking black rock about the size of an apple was discovered in the Sahara desert. ...that meteorite, which has come to be known as NWA 7034, or “Black Beauty,” is different from most other meteorites: It’s a chunk of Mars. ...Tiny grains of zircon from NWA 7034 have now revealed that hydrothermal activity likely persisted in Mars’s crust 4.45 billion years ago. That’s the earliest indirect evidence of water on the Red Planet....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/martian-meteorite-points-to-ancient-hydrothermal-activity . 

By Damond Benningfield , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The  Winchcombe meteorite  splashed into headlines on 28 February 2021, when it streaked above Gloucestershire, England, and broke apart in the atmosphere. Its largest chunk hit a driveway in the village of Winchcombe and splattered into thousands of pieces. ... Analysis of the meteorite  and video of its descent revealed that its parent meteoroid was probably 20–30 centimeters in diameter when it hit the atmosphere, with a mass of about 13 kilograms. ...The research team’s analyses revealed that the meteorite contains eight rock types, all of which show evidence of having been altered by water. ...In addition to revealing the asteroid’s history, the lab work also supported the suggestion that CM and other carbonaceous chondrites supplied young Earth with water and organic compounds....  Full article at https://eos.org/articles/a-splashy-meteorite-was-forged-in-multiple-collisions . 

https://www.science.org/content/article/mars-had-long-lived-magnetic-field-extending-chances-life By Zack Savitsky, Science.  Excerpt: Once upon a time, scientists believe, Mars was far from today’s cold, inhospitable desert. Rivers carved canyons, lakes filled craters, and a magnetic field may have fended off space radiation, keeping it from eating away the atmospheric moisture. As the martian interior cooled, leading theories hold, its magnetic field died out, leaving the atmosphere undefended and ending this warm and wet period, when the planet might have hosted life. But researchers can’t agree on when that happened. Now, fragments from a famous martian meteorite, studied with a new kind of quantum microscope, have yielded evidence that the planet’s field persisted until 3.9 billion years ago, hundreds of millions of years longer than many had thought. The clues in the meteorite, a Mars rock that ended up on Earth after an impact blasted it from its home planet, could extend Ma...

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/16/meteorite-that-landed-in-cotswolds-may-solve-mystery-of-earths-water By  Hannah Devlin , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Water covers three-quarters of the Earth’s surface and was crucial for the emergence of life, but its origins have remained a subject of active debate among scientists. Now, a 4.6bn-year-old rock that crashed on to a  driveway in Gloucestershire last year  has provided some of the most compelling evidence to date that water arrived on Earth from asteroids in the outer solar system.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/world/canada/meteorite-bed.html By  John Yoon  and  Vjosa Isai , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Ruth Hamilton was fast asleep in her home in British Columbia when she awoke to the sound of her dog barking, followed by “an explosion.” She jumped up and turned on the light, only to see a hole in the ceiling. Her clock said 11:35 p.m. ...“Oh, my gosh,” she recalled telling the operator, “there’s a rock in my bed.” A meteorite, she later learned. The 2.8-pound rock the size of a large man’s fist had barely missed Ms. Hamilton’s head, leaving “drywall debris all over my face,” she said. Her close encounter on the night of Oct. 3 left her rattled, but it  captivated the internet  and handed scientists an unusual chance to study a space rock that had crashed to Earth.…

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/famed-meteorite-reveals-early-water-mars-and-early-outer-space-bombardment Source:  By   Paul Voosen .  Excerpt: With just 15 grams of the 4.4-billion-year-old   “Black Beauty” meteorite   [from Mars] discovered in 2011 in the western Sahara, [Martin Bizzarro’s] team has revealed a record of asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions spanning nearly all of martian history. One of the most surprising findings: After Mars underwent a pummeling early in its life, all went quiet—even during a time, nearly 4 billion years ago, when our Solar System was thought to have suffered a cataclysmic assault... .  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/22/science/meteorites-chondrites-chondrules.html Source:  By Jonathan O’Callaghan, The New York Times.  Excerpt: Researchers propose a new model to explain the formation of most of the meteorites that make it to Earth. “Droplets of fiery rain.” That’s how Henry Clifton Sorby, a 19th-century British mineralogist, described the tiny spheres called chondrules found within meteorites. Chondrules are such dominant features of these meteorites that they are called chondrites, and they account for 86 percent of meteorites that have been found on Earth. Their origin, however, remains a mystery. ...Now some scientists think they have a new answer to this rocky enigma: The chondrites may have formed in an unusual event during a narrow window of time in the early solar system. The findings [ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103517302476 ], presented at a virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society this month by William ...