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These Asteroid Particles May Be Our Most 'Pristine' Sample of The Outer Solar System - ScienceAlert

These Asteroid Particles May Be Our Most 'Pristine' Sample of The Outer Solar System - ScienceAlert

These Asteroid Particles May Be Our Most 'Pristine' Sample of The Outer Solar System - ScienceAlert
Aug 15, 2022 1 min, 0 secs

According to a new, in-depth analysis of the material delivered to Earth from the asteroid Ryugu, the samples of rocks and dust are among the most uncontaminated Solar System materials we've ever had the opportunity to study – and their composition suggests that they incorporate chemistry from the outer reaches of the system.

"Ryugu particles," wrote a team led by cosmochemist Motoo Ito of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science Technology (JAMSTEC) in Japan, "are the most uncontaminated and unfractionated extraterrestrial materials studied so far, and provide the best available match to the bulk Solar System composition.".

Ito and his colleagues have found that the abundances of heavy hydrogen and nitrogen in the asteroid are consistent with an origin in the outer Solar System; that is, Ryugu started its life much farther from the Sun.

"In this study we demonstrate that [carbonaceous] meteorites, despite their geochemical importance as proxies of the bulk Solar System composition, are terrestrially contaminated samples," the researchers wrote in their paper.

The evidence presented here shows that Ryugu particles are undoubtedly among the most uncontaminated Solar System materials available for laboratory study and ongoing investigations of these precious samples will certainly expand our understanding of early Solar System processes."

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

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