'Rare and exciting' find: International team of researchers discover meteorite weighing 8 kg in Antarctica
8kg meteorite Antarctica
Antarctica is an unrelentingly harsh place to work - it’s cold, desolate and wild. However, the white landscape has once again proven to be an amazing place for meteorite hunting. An international team of scientists has recovered five new “space rocks” from the desert of Antarctica, and one of them is almost 8kg (17 pounds).
What’s amazing about this discovery is that finding a meteorite this large is rare. As per EurekAlert of the almost 45,000 meteorites found here, only a hundred or so are of the size of this newly discovered meteorite or larger.
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Maria Valdes, a research scientist at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago, who was part of this expedition, says, "Size doesn’t necessarily matter when it comes to meteorites, and even tiny micrometeorites can be incredibly scientifically valuable".
"But of course, finding a big meteorite like this one is rare, and really exciting," she adds.
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Four researchers were part of this mission - Valdes, Vinciane Debaille of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, who was leading the expedition; Maria Schönbächler of ETH-Zurich and Ryoga Maeda of Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
The team was the first to explore potential new meteorite sites which were mapped using satellite imagery.
Meteorites recovered by the team will now be analysed by the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science. Additionally, the four researchers will also be studying the meteorite's sediment that potentially contains tiny micrometeorites by the researchers at their respective universities.
Valdes says she’s eager to see what the analyses of the meteorites reveal, because "Studying meteorites helps us better understand our place in the universe,"adding that she was eager to find what the meteorites reveal.
"The bigger a sample size we have of meteorites, the better we can understand our Solar System, and the better we can understand ourselves," she added.
(With inputs from agencies)
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