It took a while for scientists to gain access to the samples that NASA’s Osiris-Rex mission has taken from the asteroid Bennu, but the wait is worth it. A New study Published on January 29 in Nature Describes an unexpected discovery in the material supplied by Osiris-Rex: residues of connections are left by the evaporation of liquid water.
Tim McCoy, the main author of the newspaper, says Popular science that the presence of these connections was completely unexpected. ‘[Finding them] Was a complete surprise, “he says. “Together, the team that wrote this article has hundreds of years of experience in investigating meteorites and none of us – in fact nobody – had ever seen some of these minerals.”
One of the reasons that the discovery is so important is that the connections must have been crushed by the evaporation of brine solutions – solutions of liquid water with high concentrations of salts dissolved. “We know this,” explains McCoy, “both because some of these minerals … actually have water in their crystal structure, and because we know the most common liquid [in the universe] Is water. There could have been a small part of other oces, such as carbon dioxide, but it was usually water. “
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The presence of these connections therefore implies the presence of liquid water at some point in the history of Bennu – or, rather, in the history of the old asteroid from which Bennu comes from. That parent -asteroid was a larger object that broke into smaller pieces at some point in the last 65 million years. McCoy explains that the parent -asteroid was partially formed from ice, and during the millennia this ice was melted by heat due to the decline of radioactive elements in the regolite of the asteroid.
McCoy says that this water “probably did not exist on the surface, but as a vein or bag below the surface of the asteroid.” This extended its existence in a liquid state, probably, as McCoy says, in ‘approximately room temperature’. The dissolved minerals may also have allowed the solution for longer to stay liquid for longer: having brine solutions in general Lower freezing points Then pure water. (This is why roads are salted during snowy weather.)
In any case, when the water eventually evaporated, it left the concentrated precipitation that turned out to be such a surprise for McCoy and his team – and when the parent – asteroid separated, those connections were passed on to his successors, including Bennu. The first connection that the team discovered in the Bennu monster was sodium carbonate, which had never before been observed in another asteroid or meteorite. Because the water absorbs in its crystal structure, his presence McCoy and other teams all over the world led to searching samples of others in water -soluble connections. They found a total of 11 of such connections, all of which were concentrated in a brine solution and then struck when the water evaporated.
This proof of the presence of liquid water on the old body from which Bennu is formed offers a tempting possibility: the possibility that Bennu’s precursor may have seen the first stirring of life. The brine of the species that apparently is formed in the pockets of liquid water on Bennu’s ancestor offers a favorable environment for the development of complex organic compounds. In a statement at the release of the newspaper, McCoy said: “We now know from Bennu that the rough ingredients of life combine really interesting and complex ways on Bennu’s parent body.” The paper also speculates that similar Pekels can exist today in the interior of Saturn’s Moon Enceladus and Mars’ Moon Ceres.
Anyway, McCoy says that the apparent presence of liquid water in Bennu’s parent -asteroid also tells us something important about that asteroid: “The fact that Bennu’s older absorbed absorbed means that it had to be outside the solar system snow line. “This line marks the distance of a star on which the temperature falls below the freezing point of water (in 2016, NASA An image recorded of this phenomenon in a young solar system.)
The snow line is especially important in the early days of a solar system, because the cloud of dust and gas that surrounds a budding star starts to merge into the protoplanetary disc from which the planets and other pioneering fires of the system will ultimately form. Beyond the snow line, water is fixed and easily aggregates in rising planets and asteroids, while water in the line remains gaseous and more difficult to catch.
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This means that objects that are formed beyond the snow line are relatively rich in water, and one Leading theory About the origin of the water on earth is that it was obtained by the conquest of such water -rich objects. And if those objects contain brine solutions that are rich in organic compounds, it is at least theoretically possible that life has already evolved into those environments for their arrival on earth.
Apart from such theoretical possibilities, McCoy says that the discovery of brine connections shows that the value of Osiris-Rex has been able to take direct physical monsters from Bennu. “These are incredibly rare minerals, so they cannot be detected from the earth.” Moreover, he says: “Many of these minerals are unstable in the atmosphere of the earth. Without the controlled return due to a spacecraft mission and a very careful curation in nitrogen to insulate them from the atmosphere, we would never have found [them] In the first place. “
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