Researchers May Have Solved a Puzzling Contradiction in the Ryugu Sample

Filed by Dr. Kai Vega

Samples from the asteroid Ryugu, and from carbonaceous chondrites that have crashed on Earth, present an apparent contradiction. Their fine-grained matrices have widely varied compositions of their clay-like minerals. That suggests that there were widely different aqueous environments in the same parent bodies, which seems unlikely. But new research may have solved that contradiction.