Scientists have found dust grains older from our solar system on an asteroid 200 million miles from Earth, where they revealed that particles from the Ryugu space rock, collected by Japanese spacecraft in 2018 and 2019, are made of silicon carbide, a chemical compound that does not occur naturally. Natural down to earth.
According to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”, the age of the sun and the planets that make up our solar system is about 4.6 billion years, while the universe was formed about 13.7 billion years ago.
A separate study of the same samples also suggested that water may have been brought to Earth by asteroids from the outer edges of the solar system.
Researchers are studying this material in an attempt to shed light on the origins of life and the formation of the universe, and previous analysis found that the building blocks of life were also present in Ryugu.
Scientists have been analyzing 5.4 grams of rocky grains from the asteroid since the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) returned the samples to Earth in December 2020.
The information obtained showed that Ryugu is an asteroid consisting of a pile of rubble made of small pieces of rock and solid matter lumped together by gravity rather than a single monolithic rock.
The data also suggested that Ryugu could be the remnant of an extinct comet that spent tens of thousands of years racing across the solar system.
Scientists believe that it then evaporated due to the high temperatures and turned into an asteroid from the rubble pile after moving to the inner asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars.
The discovery of presolar material in the latest study came as no great surprise to experts, as similar ancient grains have previously been found in many carbonaceous chondrite meteorites.
According to the researchers, there are different types of silicon carbide grains that differ in their isotopic signatures, or the number of neutrons in the silicon core and the carbon atoms that make up the compound.