A strange meteorite from Canada may be an alien from the Kuiper belt

If so, the meteorite will help scientists learn more about the early stages of the solar system.

Meteorite that fell in 2000 on the frozen surface of Lake Tagish in Canada

A meteorite that fell in Canada 16 years ago may be the first registered guest of our planet from the Kuiper Belt. Most of the meteorites found on Earth come to us from the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter. The peculiarities of the Tagish Lake meteorite, which fell in this region in 2000, suggest that this celestial body came to us from another region, far more distant from Earth than the asteroid belt.

Bill Bottke, one of the scientists who investigated this meteorite, claims that it was formed at the very beginning of the existence of the solar system. According to him, this meteorite was once part of a larger object in the Kuiper belt, which collapsed under the influence of gravity or other forces, divided into fragments.

Bottke believes that at the dawn of the solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune caused strong gravitational perturbations that affected many objects, including those that were in the Kuiper belt. Some of them under the influence of gravity gas giants were captured and transferred to the asteroid belt, or simply sent into free flight through the system. One of these captured fragments, due to the confluence of a number of circumstances, hit the Earth.

Kuiper belt and individual objects in it are the subject of close attention of scientists. The belt itself consists mainly of small bodies, presumably of material remaining after the formation of the solar system. Now the interplanetary station New Horizons is sent to the 2014 MU69 object in the belt, sending a huge amount of information about Pluto and its satellite to Earth.
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“For a short time, the gas giants had a very strong influence on each other, as well as on the comets that surrounded these planets at the time,” says Botke. As a result, a large number of comets fell from the outer borders of the solar system into its inner regions. Supposedly, some D-class asteroids were formed in the Kuiper belt. This is a class of asteroids, which includes objects with a very low albedo (0.02-0.05) and a smooth reddish spectrum without clear absorption lines. Such properties are silicates, rich in carbon or organic substances, possibly interspersed with water ice. For example, particles of interplanetary dust, which probably filled the near-solar protoplanetary disk, even before the formation of planets, consist of them.

Based on this similarity, it can be assumed that D-asteroids are the most ancient, little-modified bodies of the asteroid belt. There is a high probability that the Phobos Mars satellite is also a D-class asteroid, an alien from the Kuiper belt.

The antiquity of such asteroids, as well as their fragments, could clarify some details of the formation of the solar system. If the meteorite of Lake Tagish really flew to Earth from the Kuiper belt, then it is a very valuable object for study. In fact, this meteorite is the same age as the solar system, and its composition can explain the structural features of comets, asteroids, and the planets of our system. In addition, according to Bottke, the study of the D-class meteorite and asteroids can tell scientists where so much water appeared on Earth. Some scientists believe that the water got on the already formed planet from the outside, but experts do not know where it came from.

Pierre Vernazza from the Marseille Observatory (France) is not sure that the meteorite in question is similar in composition to D-class asteroids. But the scientist agrees that this meteorite is unusual. “Now we have no evidence that this is possible [getting an object from the Kuiper belt to Earth, approx. Ed.], ”says Vernaza.

But he is sure of this, he believes that a meteorite is a sample of matter that came to us from the very outskirts of the solar system, where there are objects whose age is almost equal to the age of the solar system itself, and which can reveal details of its early history.