Ryugu asteroid made of dust grains older than the sun!

In 1950, Erwin Schrödingerone of the founders Quantum mechanicshaving worked both to illustrate the nature of life and the emergence of issue style cosmology Relative, explained in one of the four public lectures entitled ” Science as a component of humanity ” that ” Isolated knowledge acquired by a group of specialists in a narrow field is of no value in itself at all; It has value only in the synthesis that unites it with the rest of knowledge and only in so far as it truly contributes, to this synthesis, to the answer to the question: Who are we? “.

We are already searching for our roots and cosmic identity through space missions such as the Japanese probe Hayabusa 2which was revolving aroundasteroid (162173) Ryugu From June 2018 to November 2019. I have been sampling there since They arrived on Earth and are still being analyzed.

So they belong to a member of the Apollo family of asteroids, the asteroids Near Earth Objects, even among those potentially dangerous. It was discovered in 1999 and it soon became clear that it belonged to a type C asteroid, that is, similar to the known chondrite carbonaceous meteorites on Earth.

Therefore, its chemical composition is close to that of a substance Cloud Molecular and dusty where solar system Pristine, without light and volatile ingredients like ice cream. So it was a preferred target for understanding the origin of planets and Sun Hence the origin biosphere and noosphere, so Hayabusa-2 gave us so much more Close-up photos of asteroid (162173) Ryugu.

We can convince ourselves of this through advertising Across A paper from an international team of researchers led by Jens Barosch and Larry Nittler from Carnegie Institution for Science Posted in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Members of this team told that they had discovered in the samples brought by Hayabusa-2 no less than pre-solar grains.

Key to the cycle of stars in the Milky Way

By this we mean the material Solid Which condensed into grain, not into protoplanetary disk From Gas and dust in the cooling process around the young sun, approximately 4.5 to 4.6 billion years ago, but even before the sun was born, in ambiance excellentstars in front of him from which they were expelled at the end of their lives to find themselves in the midst of the stars, and then in nebula The origin of the solar system.

Remember that there is a true astral cycle in Milky Way This causes them to evolve chemically as the interstellar medium is enriched with heavy elements. In this medium, particulate and dusty clouds, dense and cold, collapse gravitationally, destabilizing them under the influence of the pressureWhether intensity waves in our arms galaxy Or because of the shock wave of a supernova explosion.

When the clouds collapse, they crumble giving incubators of stars, some of which will evolve very rapidly by blasting into supernovae, injecting new heavy elements into the cloud as star formation continues. It is believed that the explosion of one of these stars is dubbed Coatcaused tocollapse The protosolar cloud where our sun was born. In general, the stars at the end of their lives will return the material that formed them to the interstellar medium, but with new elements, an environment in which for the same reasons new stars are born.

This is what made Janes Baruch say that, in the case of the discoveries in the Ryugu samples, ” Different types of pre-solar grains come from different types of stars and stellar processes, which we can identify by their isotopic signatures. Being able to identify these grains and study them in the lab can help us understand the phenomena Astrophysics that shaped our solar system, as well as other cosmic bodies “.

Cosmologists are already able, using sophisticated microanalytical tools, to measure the abundance of different isotopic nuclei of an element that varies in their number. neutrons And compare it to those measured in carbonaceous chondrites that hit the Earth.

About it, again in a press release from Carnegie Institution for ScienceLarry Neteller explains that The composition and abundance of pre-solar grains that we found in the Ryugu samples are similar to what we found earlier in carbonaceous chondrites. This gives us a more complete picture of our solar system’s formation processes that could inform future models and experiments on samples from Hayabusa2, as well as other meteorites. “.