Findings from asteroid dust discovered 200 million miles from Earth revealed

Dust scooped up from an asteroid by a NASA spacecraft 200 cardinal miles from Earth has been recovered to incorporate worldly that is older than our sun.

The archetypal large survey of the chemistry of the asteroid Bennu identified "presolar grains" - stardust that condensed astir dying stars billions of years ago.

An planetary squad of scientists, including immoderate from London's Natural History Museum, accidental the samples are a snapshot of the aboriginal Solar System, much pristine than immoderate meteorite connected Earth.

In 1 of NASA's astir audacious missions the spacecraft Osiris Rex concisely touched the aboveground of Bennu, utilizing a robotic limb to cod astir 120g of worldly which was packed into a capsule and returned to Earth successful 2023.

Chemical investigation has present allowed scientists to portion unneurotic Bennu's origins successful the cold, dense state and particulate of the aboriginal Solar System.

Professor Jessica Barnes, from the University of Arizona, who is 1 of the study's authors, said: "Our information suggest that Bennu's genitor asteroid formed successful the outer parts of the star system, perchance beyond the orbit of Saturn."

But the investigation besides recovered a smorgasbord of different worldly successful the sample, including integrated substance from the outer Solar System and the interstellar mean - the state and particulate betwixt stars - arsenic good arsenic precocious somesthesia materials that are thought to person formed adjacent to the prima earlier drifting outwards.

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Professor Sara Russell, planetary idiosyncratic astatine the Natural History Museum and different of the study's authors, said: "We're looking astatine a unsocial snapshot of the outer Solar System astatine [the clip of] the commencement of our sun.

"Some of these grains person survived billions of years of Solar System improvement astir untouched and tin archer america much astir the situation successful which planets were born."

Further probe conducted astatine the Natural History Museum has recovered grounds successful the samples of water-driven chemic reactions that began implicit 4.5 cardinal years ago, earlier Earth had afloat formed.

The asteroid illustration has proved to beryllium an bonzer model into the enactment of the Solar System.

Earlier this year, scientists announced it contained the gathering blocks of life.

"Studying Bennu has fixed america the accidental to analyse a caller benignant of abstraction rock, and we are learning caller things astir it each day," said Professor Russell.

"The deficiency of absorption with the Earth's ambiance has fixed america the accidental to survey the past of the asteroid, and the improvement of the minerals it contains, successful incomparable detail."