space

Editorial of the Technological Innovation site – 14/12/2022

interstellar fireball

Astronomers have found that a fireball that streaked across the skies of the Canadian province of Alberta in 2021 was generated by a celestial body made of rock, not ice.

Space rocks are constantly hitting Earth’s atmosphere, burning like fireballs; when they are large enough, a part remains which falls to the ground in the form of meteorites.

But there was something very special about this particular rock: it didn’t come from around Earth or even the asteroid belt – its origin was the outer rim of the solar system.

And the fact that it burns like a rock complicates things a bit because the theories say that celestial bodies coming from there would be formed by ice – there shouldn’t be any solid rocks there.

Where did the cometary ice go?

The most accepted scientific model proposes that just at the edge of the solar system, and halfway to the nearest stars, there is a collection of icy objects cruising through space, known as the Oort Cloud. . We have not yet been able to send a space probe there, or observe objects directly in the Oort cloud, but the spectrographic signatures picked up by telescopes support this theory.

This is why, since comets come from this same distant region, astronomers have always described them as “dirty balls of ice”, which would melt as they approached the Sun, which would explain their tails.

Things started to get complicated when we were able to study a comet up close for the first time, with the Rosetta space probe showing that the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko dries like a desert rock🇧🇷

And analysis of this newly detected celestial body now entering Earth’s atmosphere showed the same result: the celestial body, which all readings indicate originated from the same comet cradle, was solid rock.

Formation of the solar system

This result has a great impact on scientific theories because the very basis for understanding the beginnings of our solar system rests on the fact that only icy objects exist in these confines, and certainly nothing rock.

“This discovery supports an entirely different model of the formation of the solar system, which supports the idea that significant amounts of rocky material coexist with icy objects in the Oort cloud,” said Denis Vida of Western University. Ontario in Canada. . “This finding is not explained by currently preferred solar system formation models. It’s a complete game changer.”

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