Scientists are silent

Earth is under constant bombardment from space. Something fell into our atmosphere, causing an explosion. But what is it?

These pieces of space rocks, or fireballs, are usually larger pieces of asteroids or comets that smashed into their original bodies and ended up falling into Earth’s gravitational well.

But the researchers confirmed that one of these fireballs that exploded over the skies of Canada last year was not the usual type of meteor.

A mysterious space object

The very bright fireball that hit Alberta, Canada last year, It wasn’t an “ordinary” meteorite.. Scientists studying its orbit have shown that the mysterious object’s origin was at the edge of the solar system, in a mysterious region of space known as the Oort Cloud.

It is believed that The Oort Cloud is the source of icy comets It passes through the solar system.

This is not a strange phenomenon, but it is like an object that caught fire in the sky Which worried scientistswho until then had never seen things being born in that region of space.

A research team of scientists from the University of Western Ontario in Canada analyzed images and videos of the explosion and found that instead of water ice, methane and ammonia, like all things that originate from the Oort cloud, The detonated object had a configuration that no one expected.

The object was probably made of stonechallenging ancient theories about the evolution of this spherical cloud, which is said to be the remnant of the first nebula that formed our solar system.

“It represents a very different model of solar system formation, in which large amounts of rocky matter coexist with icy bodies in the Oort Cloud,” explains the analysis, detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. Denis Vida reportsUniversity researcher in Canada.

“The results cannot be explained by traditional models of solar system development, which are completely game-changing.”

The object in the Canadian sky

In the past, all the rocky fireballs that burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere came from regions in space very close to our planet.

Hadrian DevilpoixThe researcher and co-author of the study said: “As it traveled through space, the fireball plunged deeper into the atmosphere than an icy body in a similar orbit, and it exploded just like a fireball, indicating that it was indeed a stony meteorite.”

In contrast, icy comets in the Oort Cloud are soft bodies, like dusty snowballs, that slowly evaporate as they approach the Sun. Gas and dust create a strange tail that stretches for millions of kilometers.

The challenge for researchers is to understand how this stony meteorite reached the edge of the solar system. Which can also give us an answer to the mystery of the origin of man. Dr. concluded. life.