The unusual shock-darkened meteorites came from a fireball over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013.
Vishnu Reddy, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and co-author of the new study who detected shock darkening on these main-belt asteroids, said that it's a much more common phenomenon on asteroids than meteorites."Impacts are very common in asteroids and any solid body in thebecause we see impact craters on these objects from spacecraft images," he said in the statement.
"Adam [Battle]'s work has shown that ordinary chondrite asteroids can appear as carbonaceous in our classification tools if they are affected by shock darkening," Reddy said. “These two materials have different physical strengths, which is important when trying to deflect a hazardous asteroid.
The team then set about investigating the reason for this discrepancy and determining the correct classification.
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