Erg Chech 002

About Erg Chech 002

• What it is? These are the rocks containing distinctive greenish crystals, it turned out to be from outer space, left over from the dawn of the Solar System.
• They were all pieces of a meteorite known as Erg Chech 002, which is the oldest volcanic rock ever found.
• It is known as an “ungrouped achondrite” means their parent bodies and family relationships are unknown.
• Achondrites are rocks formed from melted planetesimals, which is what we call solid lumps in the cloud of gas and debris that formed the Solar System.
• Erg Chech 002 contains a high abundance of lead-206 and lead-207, as well as relatively large amounts of undecayed uranium-238 and uranium-235.
• Aluminium-26 was distributed quite unevenly throughout the cloud of dust and gas which formed the solar system.

Key facts about Erg Chech

• It is a sandy region of the Sahara in western Algeria and northern Mali.
• It consists largely of shifting dunes.

Q1) What is Uranium-238?

Uranium-238 (U-238) is a radioactive isotope of uranium, a chemical element with the symbol U and atomic number 92. It is one of the two primary isotopes of uranium found in nature, the other being uranium-235 (U-235).

Source: Sahara space rock, 4.5 billion years old, upends assumptions about the early Solar System.