Sydney, Sep 21 (IANS) Researchers have discovered an unusual kind of meteorite in the Western Australian desert and have uncovered where in the solar system it came from, a new finding suggests.
Meteorites are the only surviving physical record of the formation of our solar system and by analysing them researchers can glean valuable information about the conditions that existed when the early solar system was being formed.

However, information about where individual meteorites originated, and how they were moving around the solar system prior to falling to Earth, is available for only a dozen of around 1,100 documented meteorite falls over the past two hundred years, reports sciencedaily.com.

Phil Bland, study lead author from the Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London, said: “We are incredibly excited about our new finding. Meteorites are the most analysed rocks on Earth but it’s really rare for us to be able to tell where they came from. Trying to interpret what happened in the early solar system without knowing where meteorites are from is like trying to interpret the geology of Britain from random rocks dumped in your back yard.”

The new meteorite, which is about the size of a cricket ball, is the first to be retrieved since researchers from Imperial College London, Ondrejov Observatory in the Czech Republic, and the Western Australian Museum, set up a trial network of cameras in the Nullarbor Desert in Western Australia in 2006.

The researchers are hopeful that their new desert network could yield many more findings, following the success of their first meteorite search.

“It was amazing to find a meteorite that we could track back to its origin in the asteroid belt on our first expedition using our small trial network. We’re cautiously optimistic that this find could be the first of many and if that happens, each find may give us more clues about how the Solar System began,” said Bland.

The findings were published in the journal Science.