Until now, only a small fraction of meteorites that land on Earth had been firmly linked back to their parent body out in space – but a set of new studies has just given us compelling origin stories for more than 90 percent of meteorites today.
Past analyses of meteorites striking our planet today suggest some kind of shared origin; they’re made from very similar materials and have been baked by cosmic radiation for a suspiciously short amount of time, hinting at a relatively recent break-up from shared parent bodies.
The teams behind three new published papers used a combination of super-detailed telescope observations and computer modeling simulations to compare asteroids out in space with meteorites recovered on Earth, matching up rock types and orbital paths between the two.
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