Scientists have discovered a unique meteorite, which they believe is a part of a cosmic body that may have been involved in a huge collision in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter some 470 million years ago.
The 8cm space rock, called Osterplana 65, was found in a limestone quarry in Sweden and is said to be chemically distinct from any of the 50,000 other such objects held in collections.
The collision in the asteroid belt 470 million years ago would have been the same that produced a large class of other rocks known as L chondrites, researchers said.
The L chondrites have been found in large quantities in the sediments of a period in Earth history when the Northern Hemisphere was largely under water and marine lifeforms such as the trilobites were flourishing.
Scientists have recovered more than a hundred of these "fossil" objects in the quarry.
However, the new meteorite discovered by researchers from the Lund University in Sweden and University of California at Davis in the US stands out because geochemically its oxygen and chromium signatures are distinct.
"For a long time we called it 'the mysterious object' because it didn't resemble anything," Schmitz was quoted as saying by the 'BBC News'.
The researchers used cosmogenic dating to hypothesise that the Osterplana 65 comes from the "second asteroid" in the collision.
The technique helps determine how long the fresh surface of a broken object has been exposed to space radiation.
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
