The asteroid's minerals were formed through reactions with water more than 4.5 billion years ago.
. The work was funded by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, NASA, and the National Science Foundation’s Instrumentation and Facilities program.Researchers used isotopic analysis to find out how carbonate minerals from the asteroid were crystallized through reactions with water. According to the team, this is believed to have originally accreted to the asteroid as ice in the still-forming solar system, then warmed into liquid.
As Ryugu is only about one kilometer in diameter due to collisions and reassembly throughout its history, researchers said it is very unlikely to have been a large asteroid. The team said that any larger asteroid formed very early on in the solar system would have undergone intensive chemical differentiation due to high temperatures. "Ryugu shows no evidence of that, and its chemical and mineralogical compositions are equivalent to those found in the most chemically primitive meteorites, the so-called CI chondrites, which are also thought to have formed in the outer solar system.
The team hopes that the ongoing research on the Ryugu materials will help answer astrobiology questions by understanding volatile- and carbon-rich asteroids. Such efforts will "continue to open a window into the formation of the solar system’s planets, including Earth."Samples from asteroid Ryugu returned by the Hayabusa2 mission contain evidence of extensive alteration by aqueous fluids and appear related to the CI chondrites.
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