For millions of years, a group of tiny asteroids circled our solar system. Then, around 9 a.m. on June 28, 1911, one blazed into earthly skies near a village outside Cairo, Egypt. Locals watched the fireball, and they heard its explosion. A farmer even claimed a dog was killed by one meteorite fragment, making it — if true — the only known modern space rock casualty.
Let's hope it was just a rumor, but NASA says there's no reason to doubt it. In the years since, about a dozen siblings from that meteorite have been found all over Earth. Astronomers call these nakhlites, and they all hail from Mars. And although these space rocks have been studied for decades — scientists already knew the rocks originally formed in volcanic environments — an analysis published this week in Nature Communications has uncovered something strikingly new about the igneous nakhlites.
By figuring ...
