Vaporizing Sulfides Make Meteors Structurally Weak

Scientists analyzed what happened when two meteorite fragments were heated up to atmospheric re-entry temperatures and found voids in the samples.

A team of scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign analyzed what happened to two meteor fragments from different meteorites as they were heated up to the temperature experienced during Earth’s re-entry. They found that lucky for life on Earth, the heating vaporized a particular type of mineral, leaving behind voids in the meteor and causing the rock to be more porous. That’s good because the meteor breaks up more easily as it burns up in the atmosphere, creating less destruction on the ground.

The two meteorites sampled were Tamdakht, which landed in Morocco in 2008, and Tenham, which was recovered from Queensland, Australia in 1879. Both meteorites are chondrites, meaning they are stony meteorites without a lot of metals like iron and nickel. The two are also slightly different in composition from one another, so the team got to study how different meteors react upon re-entry.

And it turns out that iron sulfides do not like heat. Lead author Francesco Panerai explains: The iron sulfide inside the meteorite vaporized as it heated. Some of the grains actually disappeared leaving large voids in the material. The ability to look at the interior of the meteorite in 3D, while being heated, led us to discover a progressive…