Study: Analysis of asteroid reveals unexpected evidence of mini-ocean — and carbonation - Inverse

A new paper from one of Hayabusa’s Curation Teams published this month in Nature Astronomy gets at what they show about the makeup of Ryugu’s parent and the asteroids of the very early Solar System.

The makeup of Ryugu was significantly altered by liquid water in its interior.

Despite forming deep in the cold outer Solar System, water and carbon dioxide ice accreted together into the protolith that made up Ryugu’s parent along with short-lived radioactive isotopes.

The remaining anhydrous silicates, then, give the team a clue about what other materials in the early Solar System might have looked like before they crashed into Ryugu’s tiny ocean.

Speaking with Inverse, Ito notes that even if knowing the chemical composition “doesn’t tell us where the parent body was formed,” it still “allows us to build some kind of Ryugu history, how it formed in the outer solar system.”.

The Stony Analysis Team published their initial results this month in Science, which included liquid water from Ryugu trapped inside a crystal.

Because Ryugu picked up frozen carbon dioxide as well as water ice when it was forming, the liquid water found in the sample was carbonated.