Researchers have discovered that the Winchcombe meteorite that fell into a sheep field broke apart and then put back together many times while travelling through space.
according to the most recent investigation of the Winchcombe meteorite, water might have led to its extreme journey.
After thirty years, this meteorite is the first to be discovered in the UK.
These investigations, according to paper co-author Dr. Diane Johnson, aid in our understanding of how the Solar System came to be.
She stated: “The Winchcombe meteorite is a remarkable piece of space history.”
Before arriving on Earth, the rock travelled for millions of years.
The meteorite was once an ice-bearing dry rock, but over millions of years, the ice evaporated and produced a ball of mud that was repeatedly broke apart and reconstructed, according to researchers.
The proof suggests that it formed from parts of different rocks that were bound together, like shattered pieces from many jigsaw puzzles put together to create rocky fragments.
Researcher on the Winchcombe Meteorite
Dr Luke Daly, from the University of Glasgow, led the research and said: “We were fascinated to uncover just how fragmented the breccia was within the Winchcombe sample we analysed.
“If you imagine the Winchcombe 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,” he said.
Shortly after being observed as a fireball shooting across the skies in February 2021, the first piece of the Winchcombe meteorite fell on a driveway.
Just a few hours after it reached the Earth’s atmosphere, the object in question was found.
A few days later, additional pieces were discovered in a field.
The Winchcombe meteorite is part of the rare carbonaceous chondrite rock class.
They are believed to retain unaltered compounds from the Solar System’s origin over four billion years ago and make up around 3% of all meteorite found on Earth.
Scientists may be able to learn more about the evolution of the Solar System and the origin of Earth’s water by analysing those minerals.
The study was carried out by a group of academics from around the world and was published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.
