{"id":238246,"date":"2026-06-03T02:35:03","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T07:35:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/rare-meteorite-provides-evidence-of-giant-early-planet"},"modified":"2026-06-03T02:35:03","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T07:35:03","slug":"rare-meteorite-provides-evidence-of-giant-early-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/rare-meteorite-provides-evidence-of-giant-early-planet","title":{"rendered":"Rare meteorite provides evidence of giant early planet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/rare-meteorite-provides-evidence-of-giant-early-planet2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Four-and-a-half billion years ago, a massive world\u2014possibly as big as the moon or even Mars\u2014orbited our sun before crashing into another celestial body and shattering into rubble. Now, in a paper <a href=\"https:\/\/linkinghub.elsevier.com\/retrieve\/pii\/S0012821X26002128\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal <i>Earth and Planetary Science Letters<\/i>, scientists report the first definitive evidence that this lost planetary embryo (protoplanet) existed. Its unique geological makeup challenges long-held assumptions about how planets evolve.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s incredible to think there was once a world this large,\u201d said Aaron Bell, an assistant research professor in the Department of Earth Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. \u201cWe only know it existed because a few fragments of it happened to land on Earth. These meteorites preserved evidence of a completely different pathway through which early planets developed.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What gave away the lost world\u2019s secret was a piece of its debris uncovered on Earth in the Sahara Desert, known as the Northwest Africa (NWA) 12,774 angrite meteorite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Four-and-a-half billion years ago, a massive world\u2014possibly as big as the moon or even Mars\u2014orbited our sun before crashing into another celestial body and shattering into rubble. Now, in a paper published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, scientists report the first definitive evidence that this lost planetary embryo (protoplanet) existed. Its unique [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}