Scientists have found the origin of majority of meteorites that hit Earth. It is...

New Delhi, India

Scientists have been able to trace the origin of more than 70 per cent of the meteorites which have hit Earth. 

Nearly 466 million years ago, a massive swarm of asteroids violently bombarded Earth which was believed to have occurred because a large asteroid had broken into smaller fragments as it travelled in orbit between Mars and Jupiter. 

The Massalia asteroid family is a group of asteroids which have similar orbits and is likely to be the source of this massive infall.

This asteroid family dominates around 40 per cent of all meteorites which have fallen to Earth and two other families of space rocks have been named as the source of many of these Earth-bound meteorites.

In the new research, three asteroid families have been held responsible for more than 70 per cent of meteorites. These three families are Karin, Koronis and Massalia. They have been formed because of the collisions in the main asteroid belt. 

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These families were formed 5.8 million years ago, 7.5 million years ago, and 40 million years ago respectively. 

“The most recent collisional events that happened in the asteroid belt are completely dominating the flux of material to our planet,” said Michael Marsset, lead author and a research fellow at the European Southern Observatory, while speaking to Gizmodo. 

“You might think that the meteorite flux should be a blend of all the compositional classes we observe in the asteroid belt but it’s not at all the case, it’s dominated by three asteroids that fragmented recently," he added. 

Collisional cascade inside asteroid families still active, hints researcher

“Such major collisions do not happen every day—every 30 to 50 million years sounds right as a frequency, although there were three major collisions over the past 8 million years or so,” said Pierre Vernazza, a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research while speaking to Gizmodo.

“The collisional cascade inside these families is still active. That’s why they’re dominating this production of meteorites," Marsset said. 

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Meteorites which have fallen on Earth carry the mysteries of the solar system. 

“The meteorites have preserved in their present-day composition a lot of information about our early protoplanetary disk,” Marsset explained. 

"By linking these meteorites that we can study in fine detail in our laboratory to specific families in the asteroid belt, we can reconstruct the original compositional gradient and thermal gradient of our protoplanetary disk. This ultimately is the goal of this kind of study. This is what we want to learn," he added. 

(With inputs from agencies)