2023-06-21 12:15:45
We cannot say that sodium chloride, better known as common salt, kitchen salt or table salt, is in itself a surprising and fascinating mineral. However, the discovery of a smattering of tiny crystals of that salt in a sample taken from an asteroid is cause for great excitement, because it implies that the sample was in contact with water, since those specific crystals can only form in the presence of liquid water. Water is essential to life as we understand it, so the presence of water outside of Earth always has some astrobiological connotation.
The sample comes from the Itokawa asteroid and was collected in 2005 and brought to Earth in 2010 by the Japanese space probe Hayabusa.
The discovery of tiny grains of salt in a sample from Itokawa provides strong evidence that liquid water may be more common than previously thought on many of the solar system’s asteroids.
Even more intriguing, according to the research team, is the fact that the sample came from an S-type asteroid, a category known to be largely devoid of hydrated minerals, or water carriers. The discovery suggests that much of our solar system’s asteroid population may not be as dry as previously thought. The finding gives new impetus to the hypothesis that most of our world’s water may have made its way here by asteroids that fell to Earth during the planet’s tumultuous infancy.
The detailed analysis was carried out by Shaofan Che and Thomas J. Zega, both from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona in the US city of Tucson.
The Itokawa asteroid photographed from the Hayabusa space probe. (Photo: JAXA)
This study is the first to show that the salt crystals originated from the star of which Itokawa was a part, ruling out any possibility that they had formed as a result of accidental contamination that occurred after the sample arrived on Earth, a suspicion , that of contamination, which has undermined the credibility of previous studies in which sodium chloride was also found in meteorites of asteroidal origin.
The study is titled “Hydrothermal fluid activity on asteroid Itokawa.” And it has been published in the academic journal Nature Astronomy. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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