Disclaimer: I stand second to none in my deep respect and love for the space program, space exploration and science in general.
That said, I gotta question. This article states that asteroids are the product of the Big Bang and thus can give us clues as to the origins of the known Universe.
Fair estimates place the age of the Universe around 13.8 billion years. If an event occurred, let us say the explosion of the planet Cecil, 8.9 billion years ago that resulted in the destruction of formed planetary bodies, asteroids could well have resulted. Many of them. Of varying sizes.
Asteroids from planet Cecil would have spewn all over the place in all direction. One may have caught the eye of scientists on our small blue marble.
There might be interest in plucking a few grams of dirt off of its surface. I get that, I want to know more about planet Cecil as well. How can scientists state that all asteroids are the result of the Big Bang?? Examining the asteroid from planet Cecil will tell you tons about the makeup of planet Cecil but very little about the makeup of material at the moment of the Big Bang.
What am I missing here? If the answer is that a celestial body that’s 8.9 billion years old has the same makeup as a body that’s 13.8 billion years old, well then…all celestial bodies have the same makeup and we can go scrape dirt in Brooklyn if we want to know about the origins of the known Universe.
This harks back to a fundamentally dated idea of how asteroids form - the theory being that they were planetary remnants of a planet (at one point dubbed Phaeton) that used to exist between Mars and Jupiter, before it blowed up real good.
But currently, it’s generally agreed that asteroids are just products of the solar accretion disc that never made it big. There’s little likelihood any significant amount of matter bigger than a molecule made it into our solar system from any previous systems. It all accreted here
Actually, the immediate product of the Big Bang was a universe full of free quarks that were free only because they were fabulously hot.
Of course, you could say EVERYTHING is the product of the Big Bang because there was a progression from quarks to hydrogen atoms to stars to heavier elements to Super Novae, etc.
The Solar system, including the asteroids, is full of elements that can only be formed in supernovae, so the asteroids are definitely not a direct product of The Big Bang. The article you quoted doesn’t even mention TBB, but I’m sure some less sciency sites may make that reference, because “the origin of the universe” sounds cooler than “the origin of the solar system”, and they don’t know any better.
I may be able to help your confusion.
The Big Bang formed the universe.
Asteroids are left over bits from the forming of our local solar system, two different time lines.
Technically everything in our solar system came from another solar system. Our sun is a third generation star meaning it is made up of the remnants of first and second generation stars which, obviously, came from outside our solar system.
But whether those 19 count as a “significant amount of matter” is a judgement call.
Also, seems like it just moves the origin from our solar system accretion disc to the larger gas cloud “birthplace” of our Sun, if, as conjectured in that article, they probably originate from a near-at-the-time sibling system. So - extrasolar, but more-or-less contemporaneous. Definitely not back to the Big Bang.
Remember Oumuamua was an extra-solar object that flew through our solar system three years ago. It’s the first of such a thing we have ever seen but it would be surprising if this doesn’t happen a lot more than we know about since these are not easy to spot (and something we could only recently see).
It is believed there are billions of rogue planets out there in the galaxy. It would not be surprising at all to think there are a lot of smaller bits zooming about too like Oumuamua that occasionally sail through our solar system.
They won’t account for a significant amount of the solar system’s mass (not even close) but they are more than a few molecules too.
OK, I know I said I was done, but since you persist:
“There’s little likelihood” changes what, exactly?
Are you perhaps having trouble parsing what I’m saying in that sentence? Here, I’ve highlighted the relevant bits:
“There’s little likelihood any significant amount of matter bigger than a molecule made it into our solar system from any previous systems.”
A current flyby of an insignificant amount of mass does nothing to change that statement. We could find a thousand Oumuamuas flying past every year and it would still not change that statement.
Why you think “there’s little likelihood” moves the goalposts, I have no idea. It reinforces what I said, not diminishes it. And you’re the one who brought the word “few” into it, I stuck with “significant”. There could be many bigger pieces and they still would be insignificant.
Almost everyone agrees that protoplanetary accretion discs, and the molecular clouds they condense out of, are mostly made of molecular gas - hence the name. But apparently, you think a significant proportion of their mass is made of larger chunks of previous stellar generation solar systems, or molecular clouds are actually not made up of molecular gas, or … something? I don’t know what your objection is to what I said.