Eventually the sun’s gravity captured them, sucked them inwards, and burned off their water and tails. Some of these faraway asteroids were flung away from the planets as comets. “This reservoir was located in the outer regions of the protoplanetary disk, possibly in the vicinity of the birthplaces of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune,” said Hopp. One group formed near the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. Previously, it was thought these asteroids hadn’t moved very much from where they formed.īut the scientists suggested that some of these asteroids came from much further out in the solar system. Many of them wound up in the “main belt” of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Over time, the material clumped together, forming the planets we know and love today-as well as smaller chunks that became the asteroids. In the earliest days of the solar system, the young sun was surrounded by a disk of gas and dust known as a protoplanetary disk. Based on these and other measurements made of the Ryugu samples, the scientists proposed a new theory for how the asteroid population of the solar system evolved. The team found that Ryugu looked like part of a group called Ivuna-type carbonaceous chondrites. In particular, matching isotopic fingerprints can point to rocks that formed at the same place and time. Because they vary depending on the source of their original material and the conditions around them, they can tell scientists quite a bit about the rock’s origins. Any given rock will have different amounts of different types of these isotopes. One such analysis was run by an international team of scientists, including Dauphas and Timo Hopp-then a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago-who analyzed the asteroid’s isotopic “fingerprint.”Įlements come in different flavors with different masses, which are called isotopes. Scientists have been eagerly running every possible test on the fragments. And asteroids have a lot to tell us-they witnessed the formation of the planets and contain records of the conditions they experienced over the last billions of years. We have never had a pristine sample of an asteroid before the ones that make it through Earth’s atmosphere to land as meteorites are altered by the process. Then it took off and returned to Earth in late 2020, with its precious payload of dust and rocks from the asteroid miraculously intact. In 2018, a spacecraft launched by the Japanese space agency JAXA met a speeding asteroid and spent nearly a year taking readings and samples. “That’s very exciting, because it means that by looking at asteroids in the main belt, we can learn about the solar system all the way out to where the ice giants were formed,” said co-author Nicolas Dauphas, Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago and an expert on the origin of the solar system. If confirmed, the finding has implications for our understanding of the early solar system and how the planets and asteroids ended up where they are today. 20 in Science Advances by an international team including scientists with the University of Chicago, Hokkaido University and the Tokyo Institute of Technology lays out a new theory for the origin of the asteroid known as Ryugu, suggesting it originally formed alongside the ice giants Neptune and Uranus and spent time circling the sun as a comet before making its way to the asteroid belt near Earth. An analysis of rock scooped directly from the surface of an asteroid by a Japanese spacecraft suggests that it was once a comet that lost its tail.Ī study released Oct.
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