The meteorites being studied were collected in Oman by a team coordinated by Beda Hofmann from the Natural History Museum Bern. (Image: B. Hofmann / Natural History Museum Bern)
When a meteoroid travels in space, solar radiation leaves distinctive imprints on its outer layer. Together with colleagues, ETH researcher Antoine Roth has developed novel analytical techniques to detect these imprints, allowing the team to reconstruct meteorites' space journeys. The inconspicuous, small stone that was analysed with high-tech equipment is named Jiddat al Harasis 466. It travelled a long way before it entered the Earth's atmosphere and landed in the desert of Oman. 'We think that Jiddat al Harasis 466 was formed 4 million years ago as a remnant of a crash of bigger blocks in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter,' explains Antoine Roth from the Institute of Geochemistry and Petrology at ETH Zurich. Then, after a rapid transfer from the asteroid belt to Earth, it heated up intensely during atmospheric entry and lost a lot of material. What was originally a stone with a radius of two centimetres ended up as a one centimetre meteorite.
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