The 4.6-Billion-Year-Old Tape Recorder Hidden Inside Asteroid Dust

Asteroids are critical to unlock our understanding of the early solar system. These chunks of rock and dust were around at the very beginning, and they haven’t been as modified by planetary formation processes as, say, Earth has been. So scientists were really excited to get ahold of samples from Ryugu when they were returned by Hayabusa-2 a few years ago. However, when they started analyzing the magnetic properties of those samples, different research groups came up with different answers. Theorizing those conflicting results came from small sample sizes, a new paper recently published in JGR Planets from Masahiko Sato and their colleagues at the University of Tokyo used many more samples to finally dig into the magnetic history of these first ever returned asteroid samples.