The Moon’s far side is overturning a long-held theory, revealing that the early Solar System’s asteroid assault may have faded slowly instead of exploding in one catastrophic burst. For decades, scientists have debated whether the early Solar System endured one sudden, catastrophic wave of asteroid strikes or a much longer period of gradually fading violence. [...]Not all meteorites are created equal, and one that crashed through the roof of a New Jersey home is giving scientists a rare glimpse into the chemistry of an ancient asteroid while offering new clues to the puzzle of how life began on Earth.
On July 16, 2024, a daytime meteor streaked across the sky and produced a sonic boom as it passed south of the Statue of Liberty.
“A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a primitive asteroid where it experienced concentrated salty fluids—a process not previously known from this type of proto-planet world,” said lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley in a statement.
Two years later, after analyzing fragments from the event, researchers found that the meteorite contained evidence of ancient salty fluids, complex organic chemistry, and processes that occurred on a primitive asteroid billions of years ago.
Daytime meteor (left), impact site, and a fragment of the Hillsborough meteorite (Image Credit: (A) M. Kirschner and M. Hankey, American Meteor Society; [(B) to (D)] A. Gordon/SETI Institute).The findings, published in the journal Science Advances, come from an international team led by meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center.
“Our cameras in Northford, Connecticut, and Douglassville, Pennsylvania, as well as a doorbell camera in Wayne, New Jersey, captured the meteor, and from that we measured its trajectory,” said American Meteor Society operations manager Mike Hankey.
Traveling at approximately 32,000 miles per hour (14.4 kilometers per second), witnesses from the surrounding areas, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, reported seeing a bright fireball that broke apart while a part of it broke through the roof of a New Jersey residence.
“The path traced back to low in the asteroid belt,” Hankey adds.
Using footage from meteor cameras, including systems in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, researchers reconstructed the meteor’s path. The trajectory traced back to a region of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The space rock disappeared from view about 22 miles above the surface. Shortly afterward, weather radar at Newark Airport detected a cloud of falling debris stretching from Staten Island into New Jersey.
The homeowner acted quickly, handling the space rock with gloves and aluminum foil before placing it in a glass container to protect the material from contamination.
The meteorite was classified as a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite, a rare type of primitive meteorite known for containing organic compounds and evidence of water weathering.
According to researchers, the Hillsborough meteorite is only the second witnessed fall of a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite ever recorded. Most known CM meteorites belong to the less-altered CM2 category, while no CM1-type meteorite fall has ever been observed.
“A high fraction of compounds were the product of organic chemistry with minerals,” said organic mass spectrometry specialist Phil Schmitt-Kopplin of Technical University Munich. “We do not know if these magnesium organic compounds were contributed by brine chemistry or were simply left over from earlier impact shock processes.”
The final analysis showed tiny salt-rich pockets inside the meteorite, pointing to a formation where water once evaporated on its parent asteroid, leaving behind highly saline fluids. Scientists are comparing these minerals with samples from the asteroids Ryugu and Bennu to better understand early solar system chemistry.
These ancient salty waters may have helped protect and change the molecules needed for life before life first began. The meteorite contained carbon, nitrogen, amino acids, and other organic compounds, many of which appear to have formed through interactions between water, minerals, and carbon-rich chemistry.
“We are thrilled that nature delivered such a precious asteroid sample on our doorstep,” said curator Denton Ebel from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the American Museum of Natural History.
The recent paper, “Meteor over New York City: Brines in a primitive CM asteroid,” appeared in the journal Science.
Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.
Asteroid 44 Nysa has the weirdest shape yet seen for an asteroid, and that’s saying something.
The post Astronomers Spot Weird, Three-Lobed Asteroid with a Moon appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
Astronomers have made a surprising discovery about one of the brightest space rocks in the main asteroid belt.
With help from some of the astronomy world’s most powerful ground-based telescopes, astronomers now report new evidence that the asteroid (44) Nysa is vastly unlike most asteroids in appearance, possessing an unusual three-lobed structure.
However, that’s not all the team behind the new research says they have discovered: the object also appears to be accompanied by a previously unknown object.
According to the international team behind the discovery, the roughly 47-mile-wide asteroid Nysa is a rare variety of space object, whose uneven appearance could offer new insights into the violent collisions that played a significant role in shaping the early solar system. Belonging to a rare class of asteroids, the object may also help scientists better understand how such objects preserve material from early in the universe.
While the Nysa’s unusual shape and accompanying object, which astronomers have characterized as a small moon, are all newly-discovered features, knowledge of the asteroid’s existence goes back more than a century, and astronomers have long studied the object due to its unusually bright surface, which is believed to be rich in a translucent crystalline mineral called enstatite.
Based on past observations, astronomers suspected that the object might possess an elongated shape, composed of two connected lobes, although the object’s exact shape remained unknown.
That all changed after astronomers turned the SHARK-VIS instrument on the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, and the SPHERE/ZIMPOL instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, toward the object. Doing so allowed researchers to capture the sharpest images of Nysa ever seen from Earth.
Based on those observations, astronomers have now revealed an asteroid unlike any previously seen.
Kate Minker, a Lowell Observatory astronomer and the lead author of a new paper detailing the discoveries, says the new images reveal a truly unique asteroid, in addition to offering potential clues about its formation.
“The images reveal a remarkably unusual object,” Minker said in a statement. “The most likely explanation is that Nysa is either a contact trinary, consisting of three connected components, or an extremely irregular coherent body unlike anything we’ve previously observed.”
To determine the reasons for its odd shape, the team combined the new imagery made possible with the Large Binocular Telescope’s SHARK-VIS instrument and the SPHERE/ZIMPOL with existing photometric observations obtained by other observatories around the world. The resulting data set offered Minker and her team a detailed three-dimensional model of the asteroid.
Now, the team reports that their reconstruction of Nysa points to strong evidence that it consists of three distinctive lobes, each of which is connected by more narrow regions.
Another intriguing finding from the new data is the identification of the small satellite orbiting Nysa, which the researchers have given the temporary designation of S/2026 (44) 1.
Observed during two separate campaigns, this tiny moon is believed to be only a little more than a half mile across and orbiting at least 106 miles from its host asteroid.
“We borrowed a specialized technique from another field of astronomy, known as ‘high-contrast imaging,’ to detect the small moon whose faint light was overwhelmed by the intense brightness of the primary asteroid,” said Gianluca Li Causi of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in a statement.
Right now, scientists believe Nysa’s unusual shape was likely the result of an ancient collision, in which fragments expelled from larger bodies were gradually reassembled over time into a single body.
There are other possibilities, too. One theory holds that Nysa could be a victim of a cosmic hit-and-run incident, resulting from a collision with a much larger asteroid at some point in the very distant past—possibly billions of years ago.
Minker and her team hope that future observations of the asteroid and its newly discovered moon will provide further insights and eventually allow astronomers to calculate Nysa’s mass and density more accurately.
Doing so could ultimately bring to light which of the competing scenarios about its formation is most likely to be accurate, and ultimately, it could elevate Nysa to a small—but quickly growing—class of unusual asteroids that may preserve a record of the catastrophic conditions in our solar system, which helped shape it during its very earliest periods.
The team’s new paper, “Unmasking (44) Nysa: Evidence for a trilobate structure,” was recently uploaded to the arXiv.org preprint server.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
The Chicxulub impact not only plunged Earth into an impact winter but also produced a dust blanket that later overheated the planet, according to new research from Purdue University and the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The post Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Didn’t Just Strike Earth, Its Dust Cloud Cooked It appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
New analysis of dust deposits left after the massive asteroid hit Earth around 66 million years ago suggests the event created a thick, worldwide dust blanket that drove heat down toward the planet’s surface, resulting in global wildfires.
The researchers behind the new study said the evidence for a post-impact dust blanket and resulting heat wave adds new fuel to the debate about what role, if any, the Chicxulub asteroid played in their extinction, by suggesting most unsheltered animals would have died instantly.
While scientists agree that a massive chunk of space rock slammed into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, they have continued to debate the event’s impact on the end of the dinosaurs‘ reign. Still, the timing of the two events, and the evidence for a mass extinction of animals incapable of seeking the necessary shelter to survive the asteroid’s impact, has led most to connect the two events to some degree.
Further studies of the impact have shown that the event’s immense heat and pressure vaporized a massive amount of rock, resulting in a huge cloud of dust and rock vapor high into the Earth’s atmosphere. As some of that dust condensed into tiny rock ‘spherules’ and slammed back into the surface, the friction between them and the air generated a corresponding heat pulse.
According to the authors of the new study, many theories suggested that this heat pulse acted like a planetary-wide broiler, including “radiating enough heat to sizzle thin-skinned animals without shelter,” but not enough for plants to suddenly burst into flames. The team said that this result temporarily caused researchers to move away from the idea that the immediate impact event caused the dinosaur’s extinction rather than a longer, more drawn-out event.
Now, after years of new ideas, the team said that a 2023 discovery once again changed the debate, leading to their new proposal.
According to the team’s statement, the 2023 discovery involved a layer of “extremely fine post-impact dust” that could have formed from rock vapor that did not condense into spherules.
“It reinvigorated my interest in what happened to the leftover vapor,” explained Brandon Johnson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University and lead author of the study detailing the new theory, “that’s where this work started.”
To determine what effect such a post-impact dust layer might have had on dinosaurs and other terrestrial animals, the team plugged the new data into previous simulations of the Chicxulub event. Johnson and colleagues especially wanted to know how the dust layer would boost Earth’s retention and release of heat energy generated by the falling rock spherules.
After running several simulations, the team determined that the dust layer would have increased the surface heat by 3.5 times compared to an event that only included the falling spherules. Unlike earlier models, this new version with the dust layer included showed that the heat pulse would have been enough to “kill animals and start spontaneous forest fires.”
“We’re in the realm where we might be essentially killing off everything within that first hour or two,” Johnson explained.
Notably, the researcher said his team’s concept is not unlike alternative extinction theories that credit a global post-impact winter for the eventual mass extinction of dinosaurs and other lifeforms.
“It seems counterintuitive,” Johnson said, “but actually it’s the same effect.”
The research compared the idea to how an insulated mug can keep hot coffee hot and iced coffee cold.
“Once the spherules finished falling and the fires petered out, massive dust clouds could have blocked warmth from the Sun for years to decades and caused a global winter,” the authors explained.
When discussing how the team’s findings might affect the ongoing debate about dinosaur extinction, Johnson said the work seems to offer strong support to the impact extinction theory.
“This work of ours supports this idea that it really is the impact that was devastating to terrestrial life and caused the mass extinction,” the researcher explained.
Although the team suspects that the global fires caused by the dust amplified the heat wave, they point out that a more complete geological record would likely be needed to provide confirmation. Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at University College London who was not involved with this study, said researchers could find a record of global wildfires, but “we just don’t have it so far.”
“It would be great to figure out which animals survived right at the impact and what their biological features were,” Chiarenza added. “This could finally tell us why some animals made it when others, like the dinosaurs, didn’t.”
The study “Heat and wildfires during the K-Pg mass extinction enhanced by fine dust” was published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and has spent the last six years as Associate News Editor and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him at christopher@thedebrief.org
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