On February 22 , 2021 a ball of fire ( bright meteor ) streak across the sky over Alberta , Canada , 100 kilometers ( 62 miles ) north of Edmonton . Anetwork of tv camera , established in the hope of finding where meteorites might down , tracked it . In this casing no pieces reached the ground , but that did n’t stop the event sustain major scientific import . A unexampled paper reason the meteor ’s orbit and behavior present a challenge to what we think Trygve Halvden Lie at the outer compass of the Solar System , and therefore how it – and probably other planetary system – formed .

Like a high mountain , the Solar System has a snowline . Objects orbiting inside it are mostly rock , while those further out are either gaseous state colossus , icy Sun Myung Moon or “ dirty snowballs ” . Models of the Solar System are built around this observation .

We jazz less about the outmost region of our system , known as theOort swarm , since no ballistic capsule has ever got close to even one aim out there , let alone a statistically important sample distribution . Sometimes , however , the Oort swarm comes to us , or at least parts of it do , in the form of comet and meteoroid . What we have seen align with the arithmetic mean that the Oort swarm would be overwhelmingly compose of ice , withrare exceptions , until the Alberta fireball provided a plot twirl .

The meteoroid could have a heavy scientific effect , considering it only weigh 2 kilo ( 4.4 pounds ) and was about the size of a volleyball . Triangulation of the cameras in the Global Fireball Observatory leave astronomer to confirm its f number and path as uniform with come from the Oort cloud , with an orbit lasting 350 - 3,500 years and a greatest aloofness from the Sun of at least 100astronomical units .

Dr Hadrien Devillepoix of Curtin University tell IFLScience the Alberta bolide ’s speed of 62 km per second ( 140,000 mph ) was so nifty there was no agency any material was going to strive the earth without it being a swell tidy sum bighearted . “ If it had been coming from the main asteroid belt it would have been just on the edge of the size of it where pieces might come through , ” he said . Nevertheless , establish on the way of life it fragmentise in the standard pressure the authors are convinced it was formed from rock ‘n’ roll , not chalk .

Close encounter with satellite ’ gravity can interchange small objective ’ orbits , but Devillepoix differentiate IFLScience , “ To create the illusion of occur from the Oort cloud you ’d need an encounter so close it would practically have to go by inside the planet . ”

Initial orbital modelling raised the hypothesis the meteoroid was actually interstellar , likeOumuamuaandBorisov ; however , extra data point narrow the error bars to the point where Devillepoix tell this is very unlikely .

Instead , Devillepoix and co - authors pop the question the shooting star is part of a class of objects that formed close enough to the Sun to be rocky , probably quite near Jupiter . Encounters with planet and planetesimal early on in the Solar System ’s development forced them out , along with icy objects that started out somewhat further from the Sun , until both take the Oort cloud .

With only a single representative , it ’s potential this was major outlier , but Devillepoix tell IFLScience astronomers have experience extrapolating from a unmarried example , citing the case of theChelyabinsk meteor . The source propose the proportion of gelid / rough objects with stack greater than 10 g ( 0.4 ounces ) in the Oort swarm lies between 130:1 and 5:1 . That ’s a freehanded range , but also a major shift , since old estimates consist between100:1 and 2,000:1 . To explain a proportion like that , specially at the lower end of the grasp , would demand a serious rethink of how objects form from the protoplanetary disk .

The newspaper is put out inNature Astronomy .