This Asteroid Held Liquid Water Much More Recently Than We Thought

The famous asteroid , Ryugu, is drip-feeding scientists crucial information about its watery past.

Using a tiny, 80-milligram sample of the near-Earth asteroid, researchers have discovered evidence that liquid water was sloshing about within the rock much more recently than scientists believed was possible.

The findings suggest that Ryugu's parent asteroid hosted liquid water for an astonishingly long time, without evaporating , degassing , or chemically reacting with minerals.

"It was a genuine surprise!" says geochemist Tsuyoshi Iizuka from the University of Tokyo.

"We found that Ryugu preserved a pristine record of water activity, evidence that fluids moved through its rocks far later than we expected."

Before it was born, Ryugu was part of a ' planetesimal ' – the seed o