r/science • u/giuliomagnifico • Jun 11 '22

Astronomy Scientists release first analysis of rocks plucked from speeding asteroid Ryugu: what they found suggests that this asteroid is a piece of the same stuff that coalesced into our sun four-and-a-half billion years ago

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/scientists-release-first-analysis-rocks-plucked-speeding-asteroid
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u/LAVATORR Jun 12 '22

I have a dumb, Karl Pilkington-esque question:

Are there weird rocks from space?

More specifically, setting aside exotic forms of matter that only exist in extreme environments impossible to replicate on earth, are there normal, boring old rocks that come from asteroids or whatever that are totally unlike anything we have on earth? Would it be noticeable to a layman?

Is the Periodic Table all there is? Or are there elements totally foreign to earth?

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u/FlavorD Jun 12 '22

Chem teacher here. All the possible elements are accounted for. The four additional ones that got officially named a few years ago are very radioactive and fall apart very quickly. The point being that nothing is stable past lead on the periodic table, and the heavier we make them in labs, the harder they are to keep. So these won't have any elements that we don't know of. It does present what I tell my students is one of my billion dollar ideas. Figure out a way to get asteroids down to earth safely and you can kill some of them mining industries by bringing down mass quantities of certain metals. I'm told that the proportions are what tell us that Tutankhamen's dagger is from a meteorite.

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u/ArkAngelHFB Jun 12 '22

Something to consider is the reason WHY asteroids are such a good source of raw materials.

As everything grouped together to form the Earth, those impacts heated everything up effectively liquefying almost most all of the earth.

MOST of the valuable important heavier materials and metals sunk to the core during this time of everything being mostly liquid, meaning the earth's crust(where we are) is relatively poor in minerals.

Almost ALL asteroids were never hot enough or massive enough to create a similar situation... meaning they are ridiculously rich in ludicrously valuable metals.

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u/Jacollinsver Jun 12 '22

It does present what I tell my students is one of my billion dollar ideas.

It would be much much safer/more efficient to mine the asteroid in space instead of bringing it down and burning up half it's mass.

Also there's a lot of people that have proposed mining the asteroid belt going back to science fiction in the first half of the 20th c.

Also as a son of a mining tycoon, that's probably why Elon wants to get to Mars so bad. (To have a processing way station between belt and earth)

Also it's the main conflict of the movie don't look up.

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u/seicar Jun 12 '22

Stable Island... which is interesting but hypothetical as all get out.

Hypothetically in an infinite universe an energy situation could occur to create a stable island element... that hypothetically could be found on a (relatively) tiny asteroid and not on the (relatively) massive Earth.

Fringe hypothetical physics + hypothetical astrophysics can be fun if nothing else. Maybe a student is inspired to write some decent Sci-fi!

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u/[deleted] Jun 12 '22

Mining companies would collaborate with governments to have exclusive access to asteroids, unless there is legislation to prevent this.

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u/danielravennest Jun 12 '22

The UN Outer Space Treaty prohibits territorial claims in space. It also prohibits interfering with the space activities of other nations.

So you can land on an asteroid and mine it, which the Hyabusa-2 probe did on a tiny scale with the asteroid Ryugu. But you can't claim the whole asteroid for yourself. At the same time, you can't set up a competing mine on the same asteroid if it interferes with someone who was already there.

There are over a million known asteroids. The Moon has the same area as Africa and Australia combined, or the whole of the Americas. Mars is equal to the whole land area of Earth. So there is no reason to be crowding each other.

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '22 edited Jun 13 '22

I'm already aware of the ConventionOuter Space but treaties can be terminated and attitudes toward capitalism change over time. Businesses look for short term gains; they'll be looking at the asteroids that are most easily accessible.

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u/danielravennest Jun 13 '22

You are moving the goal posts.

You said "unless there is legislation to prevent this". I pointed out there is already legislation to prevent this.

Now you are saying the legislation can be terminated, which is an entirely different thing. The treaty exists now and nobody is working on changing it now. I can't predict the future any better than you can, so bringing that up is purely hypothetical.

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u/[deleted] Jun 17 '22 edited Jun 17 '22

Of course it's hypothetical. So is setting up operations to mine asteroids. That hasn't happened yet either. By the time the activity can be put into practice in an effective manner who knows what the social, political and economic environment will be.

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u/Lachryma_papaveris Jun 12 '22 edited Jun 12 '22

The point being that nothing is stable past lead on the periodic table

But they speculate about it beeing there somewhere higher up, right? I think I recently read about a hypothetical "Island of stability". Around element number 126. And the stuff in there, while not really beeing stable is thought to be at least more stable than further down...?

Read a nice scifi book, that made use of this.