Meteorites contain a wealth of information about the origins of our solar system, helping us to understand their, and even Earth’s, origin and evolution.
On a Sunday morning in late August 2024 a nine-year-old girl named Eli-zé du Toit was sitting on her grandparents’ porch near a small town in South Africa ’s Eastern Cape province, when she heard a long rumble, then heard a rustling in a nearby fig tree. As she watched, a rock fell out of the tree. When Eli-zé picked it up, she noticed that the rock had a black crust and a grey interior “like concrete”. It was warm on the crust and cold on the inside.
How rare is it for a meteorite to fall in South Africa and why is it so important to study them? In 2023 two meteorites found on a farm in the Northern Cape province became the country’s 50th and 51st to be formally recognised by the Meteoritical Society’s nomenclature committee, which adjudicates all new meteorite submissions from around the world. Once this specimen has gone through that process it’ll become 52 on the country’s list.
What do we know about this meteorite? There are different types of meteorites. The most common are chondrites – they make up about 86% of all meteorites that have been found globally. They are the oldest solid objects in the solar system, formed around 4.57 billion years ago.
Do we know where in space it originated? It’s likely to have come from one of the larger bodies in the asteroid belt, which is between Jupiter and Mars. After repeated impacts onto that body, one impact will have shot this piece off and sent it on a trajectory towards Earth. We can’t yet say if that happened tens of millions of years ago or thousands of millions of years ago.
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