meteorites tagged posts

Locals watched in awe as a fireball exploded and hundreds of meteorite fragments rained down on the city of Tatahouine, Tunisia, on June 27, 1931. Fittingly, the city later became a major filming location for the Star Wars movie series. The desert climate and traditional villages became a huge inspiration to the director, George Lucas, who proceeded to name the fictional home planet of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, “Tatooine.”

The mysterious 1931 meteorite, a rare type of achondrite (a meteorite that has experienced melting) known as a diogenite, is obviously not a fragment of Skywalker’s home planet. But it was similarly named after the city of Tatahouine...

Results of study from Ryugu samples.

Micrometeorites originating from icy celestial bodies in the outer Solar System may be responsible for transporting nitrogen to the near-Earth region in the early days of our solar system. That discovery was published today in Nature Astronomy by an international team of researchers, including University of Hawai’i at Manoa scientists, led by Kyoto University.

Nitrogen compounds, such as ammonium salts, are abundant in material born in regions far from the sun, but evidence of their transport to Earth’s orbital region had been poorly understood.

“Our recent findings suggests the possibility that a greater amount of nitrogen compounds than previously recognized was transported near Earth, potentially serving as building blocks for life on o...

Water makes up 71% of Earth’s surface, but no one knows how or when such massive quantities of water arrived on Earth.

A new study published in the journal Nature brings scientists one step closer to answering that question...

A team of researchers from Université Clermont Auvergne, working with a colleague from Universität Bayreuth, has found evidence that suggests the Earth’s composition changed over time during its early years via collisional erosion. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their study of the amounts of samarium and neodymium in meteorites and what it showed them about the processes that led to the current makeup of the Earth. Zoë Malka Leinhardt, with the University of Bristol, has published a Perspective piece in the same journal issue outlining theories regarding the formation of the Earth and the work done by the team on this new effort.

Prior research has suggested that planets form from collisions of material in accretion ...