Rocks like this are like bits of unmixed flour that survived intact in the final loaf of bread — not delicious, but very informative.
The clasts also have much higher concentrations of presolar grains than the rest of the Ryugu material. The grains contain silicon carbide, which is easily destroyed by water, plus an extra abundance of organic matter.
That means the grains could not have been part of Ryugu’s parent body, which was extensively altered by water. The researchers think the grains were bits of a comet that formed in the outer solar system’s Kuiper belt, where the conditions were cool and dry. Then the grains sprinkled onto the rubble that formed Ryugu sometime between the original asteroid’s destruction and the rubble pile’s formation.
“Between these events, it kind of collected some other friends that came from other bodies, from different parts of the solar system,” Nguyen says. It’s not yet clear how material from the outer solar system found its way to Ryugu. Perhaps the asteroid formed farther from the sun — and hence, closer to the Kuiper belt — than it is today. “It’s interesting to visualize how this asteroid came about and what it gathered along the way.
The discovery is “very exciting,” says cosmochemist Philipp Heck of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, who was not involved in the new work. “These clasts that got incorporated into Ryugu after it formed, they’re really valuable. I think they’re even more valuable than the Ryugu sample itself.”The clasts can reveal what the unaltered ingredients that formed the solar system were made of. Think of the disk that formed the planets as bread dough, Heck says.
“If we want to understand the ingredients from which the solar system formed, the original ingredients, we need to find these very rare, unaltered clasts,” Heck says. “This is one of them.”
France Dernières Nouvelles, France Actualités
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