Berlin’s Natural History Museum today reported the discovery of two possible fragments, almost the size of a walnut, of the asteroid 2024 BX1 that burned in the sky above the city of Nennhausen on the night of January 20 to 21about 70 kilometers from the German capital.

French astronomer and asteroid researcher Franck Marchis had reported on his X account last night that a team of four Polish meteorite seekers had found fist-sized fragments of asteroid 2024 BX1.

In the coming days, the chemical composition and origin of the fragments discovered today will be analyzed in the laboratories of the Natural History Museum in Berlin by researchers from this institution and their partners, including the Free University of Berlin and the German Aerospace Center.

The small celestial body had passed through the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of more than 15 kilometers per second on the night from Saturday to Sundayin which it shone brighter than the full moon and finally It disintegrated about 20 kilometers above the Havelland region, west of Berlin.

Due to the high temperatures it experiences as it falls through the atmosphere, this rock usually reaches the ground more or less black and resembles a piece of charcoal in color, but the texture is much softer because the heat normally turns the material on the outside to melt .

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Therefore, the white spots that the rocky material shows in the photos of the Polish searchers are surprising, says “Spiegel”.

Everything seems to indicate that the fragments found by this group of searchers are not the most common group of meteorites on Earth, chondrites, but It is possibly an achondrite, much rarer.

According to the director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Thorsten Kleine, BX1 could have separated in 2024 from the asteroid Vesta, the most massive in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (JO)