These mysterious meteorites on Earth spawned by GIGANTIC 6561-foot asteroid?

In February 2013, a meteorite exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia and rained small pebbles all over the streets. These broken down pieces of the meteorite had a strange and mysterious pattern on them. They were covered in thin dark stripes. This had confused the scientists for a long time because meteorite remains can come in different colors due to the composition of the particles, but they never appear with stripes. After studying the event and finding more examples of it in space, it was revealed that this was caused due to a process called shock darkening but it was not understood why this did not happen to other meteorite remains. Notably, this confusing question that has puzzled the astronomy world for years, might just have been solved by a group of researchers. And they think it is all because of a potentially hazardous asteroid.

The research was published in The Planetary Science Journal and is titled ‘Physical Characterization of Near-Earth Asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2: Evidence of Shock Darkening/Impact Melt’. The paper claims that the dark-streaks on meteorites were a phenomena unique to a particular asteroid in our solar system. This near Earth asteroid is called asteroid 1998 OR2 and it last came close to the Earth in April 2020. The asteroid is gigantic at an estimated diameter of more than 6561 feet (2 kilometers) and it revolves around the Sun between the orbits of Earth and Jupiter.

A potentially hazardous asteroid could be behind dark-streaked meteorites

So, what makes this asteroid special? To understand that, we must first understand the process of shock-darkening. “Shock darkening is an alteration process caused when something impacts a planetary body hard enough that the temperatures partially or fully melt those rocks and alter their appearance both to the human eye and in our data. This process has been seen in meteorites many times but has only been seen on asteroids in one or two cases way out in the main asteroid belt, which is found between Mars and Jupiter,” said lead study author Adam Battle, a University of Arizona graduate student.

This research implies that the Chelyabinsk meteorite was a part of the 1998 OR2 asteroid which broke apart from its parent body and that’s why it displayed those strange dark-streaks. But there is a reason why this was hard to believe. The 1998 OR2 asteroid was considered to be a carbonaceous asteroid which is not prone to shock darkening. This was believed because unlike a chondrite asteroid, its appearance was darker.

The research has found an answer to this question as well. They believe that the asteroid was definitely chondrite but due to collisions in space, it underwent a phase of shock darkening and began appearing like a carbonaceous asteroid.