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Home: high close views on the surface of the ryugu. Paste: Hayabusa2, an illustration of a Japanese spacecraft that captured this image. | Credit: Jaxa, Utokyo & Collaberrs/DLR German Aviation and Space Center
Liquid water flowed through the surface of the asteroid, which gave birth to an almost land object (neo) much later than scientists thought it was possible, a new study.
The discovery that water existed in liquid, a billion years after the formed father Ryugu organ was performed to examine rock samples, which were collected by the Japanese Hayabusa2 probe in 2018-2019, and returned to Earth in 2020. December 5
Carbon asteroids, such as a rotating top form of rhythm, have long been known from the ice and dust in the outer solar system, as the planet has been formed around the baby’s sun about 4.6 billion years ago. Thus, it is believed that in objects such as Ryugu have a “fossil” record of an untouched material from the dawn of our planetary system. However, before this study, scientists thought that asteroid water activity lasted only in the earliest moments of the solar system history.
Thus, the new discovery could change the way we think about the formation of planets about 4.6 billion years ago, and further strengthen the idea that asteroids have planned the primordial land and introduced most of our planet’s water.
“We found that Ryugu preserved an undamaged recording of water, evidence that fluids were moving through their rock much later than we expected,” said Tsuyoshi Iizuka, a researcher at the University of Tokyo. “This changes the way we think of the long -term destiny of water in asteroids. The water has long hanging and was not exhausted as fast as it thought.”
Ryugu chemical imbalances
Iizuka and colleagues came to their conclusion when they investigated radioactive elements of isotopus lutatium and Hafnium Ryugu rock samples. This is useful because the radioactive decomposition of these isotopes can be used as a natural clock for geological processes.
Thus, the concentration of these isotopes can be correlated with the asteroid age. Ryugu samples, which Hayabusa2 at home, was higher in Hafni’s isotopes compared to the lutetium isotopes than expected. This showed that some liquids were washing a luteum from rock on the asteroid.
“We thought the chemical recording resembles certain meteorites that were already being investigated on Earth,” Iizuka explained. “However, the results were completely different. It meant that we had to carefully reject other possible explanations and finally concluded that the Lutheium-Hafnium system was disrupted by the late fluid flow.
“Most likely caused a larger Ryugu asteroid father, who broke the rock and melted the buried ice that allows the liquid water to be transported through the body. It was a real surprise! This effect can also be responsible for the parental body disorder.”
The diagram shows how the research team believes that Rytis has developed over time. | Credit: Iizuka et al., 2025
If it was actually water in the parents’ body for more than a billion years, one of the main pickups is that carbon rich asteroids may have contained much more water than previously thought. This means that they could enter the ground much more water by struck the surface of our original planet than was calculated earlier. This would have had a major influence on the early oceans of the Earth and its atmosphere.
“The idea that a similar thing has been on the ice for so long have been amazing,” Iizuka explained. “This shows that the building blocks of the Earth were much humid than we imagined. It makes us rethink of the initial conditions of the water system of our planet. Although it is too early to say, my team and others may rely on these studies to find out things, including how and when our land has become living.”
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It is surprising that this discovery is that the team has been able to do its own research with Ryugu examples equal to the grain part. This required new and refined elements separated methods and improved methods to analyze isotopus incredible accuracy.
“Our small sample size was a huge challenge,” Iizuka said. “We had to design new chemistry methods that reduced the elementary loss by distinguishing several elements from the same fragment. In addition, we could never detect such subtle signs of late fluid activity.”
The next step of the team will be to investigate the phosphate vein in the samples. This should allow scientists to find out the more accurate flow of water through the body of parents, which gave birth to Ryugu. Researchers will also compare their results to the analysis of asteroid Benn samples, which the NASA mission Osiris-Rex returned to Earth in 2023. September
This could reveal whether the flow of late water on the Ryugu asteroid parents was only specific to this body or whether similar water activity was preserved in other asteroids.
The team survey was published on Wednesday (September 10) in Nature.