Wow! First rock to leave Earth and then RETURN! Meet, the Boomerang meteorite
Photo Credit: Pixabay A rock on the Earth was somehow hurled into space, and floated there for an extended period of time before making its way back home. It has been dubbed as the Boomerang meteorite.
Photo Credit: Pixabay A few years back, a dark reddish-brown stone was picked up from the Sahara desert in Morocco which was found to be an Earth rock returning from space after thousands of years.
Photo Credit: Pixabay The rock was named Boomerang meteorite. Later the rock was officially named Northwest Africa 13188 (NWA 13188) by Jerome Gattacceca, a geophysicist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research who is leading the study.
Photo Credit: Pixabay Early diagnostic tests reveal the unusual stone has the same chemical composition as Earth's volcanic rocks.
Photo Credit: Pixabay However, some elements appear to have transformed into lighter versions called “isotopes” due to interactions with cosmic rays in space.
Photo Credit: Pixabay Scientists believe the meteorite must have spent more than 2,000 to tens of thousands of years in orbit around Earth before entering the atmosphere again.
Photo Credit: Pixabay Another thing which is crucial is the glossy coat of melted surface called a fusion crust on the rock. According to space.com, this forms during the journey from space to Earth’s atmosphere to the ground.
Photo Credit: Pixabay Albert Jambon, a retired French professor from the Sorbonne University of Paris, purchased the NWA 13188 rock from a Moroccan dealer however, no one knew what’s the worth of the rock.
Photo Credit: NASA The timeline and age of the rock was hard to find. However, estimations by Gattacceca and fellow researchers suggest that a 0.6-mile (1 km) wide asteroid striking Earth 10,000 years ago would have formed a crater with a diameter of about 12.4 miles (20 km).
Photo Credit: Pixabay There is no official term for the classification of the Earth rock. Some geologists refer to the group as "terrestrial meteorites."
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