hawaii at manoa who died in february argued in 2010 that aubrites were more likely to have originated from other kinds of asteroids than something that was ejected from mercury with some scientists favoring a group of asteroids in the belt called etype asteroids among his evidence were signs that aubrites had been blasted by the solar wind something mercurys magnetic field should have protected againstvideoa video by nasas solar dynamics observatory showing several views of mercurys transit across the sun in 2019creditcreditnasa solar dynamics observatory via associated pressdr cartier however has another idea what if aubrites originally came from mercuryfollowing from the hypothesis that a sizable object collided with a younger mercury dr cartier said a large amount of material would have been thrown into space about a third of the planets mass a small amount of that debris would have been pushed by the solar wind into what is now the asteroid belt forming the etype asteroidsthere the asteroids would have remained for billions of years occasionally smashing together and being continually blasted by the solar wind explaining the solar wind fingerprint seen in aubrites but eventually she suggested some pieces were pushed toward earth and fell to our planet as aubritic meteoriteslow levels of nickel and cobalt found in aubrites match what we would expect from the protomercury dr cartier says while data from nasas messenger spacecraft that orbited mercury from 2011 to 2015 supports similarities between mercurys composition and aubritesi think aubrites are the shallowest portions of the mantle of a large protomercury dr cartier said this could resolve the origin of mercuryif true it would mean that we have had pieces of mercury albeit a much more ancient version of the planet hiding in drawers and display cases for more than 150 yearsit would be fantastic said sara russell a meteorite expert at the natural history museum in london who was not involved in dr cartiers work the museum has 10 aubrites in its collectionimagecreditjonathan ocallaghanother experts have reservations about the hypothesisjeanalix barrat a geochemist at the university of western brittany in france and one of the few aubrite experts in the world does not think there is enough aubritic material in meteorite collections to work out whether their contents match with models of the super mercurythe authors are a little bit optimistic he said the data they use is not sufficient to validate their conclusionsin response dr cartier said she removed possible contaminating rocks from her aubrite samples to get representative levels of nickel and cobalt which she was confident are correctjonti horner an expert in asteroid dynamics from the university of southern queensland in australia also was not sure whether material from mercury could enter a stable orbit in the asteroid belt and hit earth billions of years later it just doesnt make sense to me from a dynamics point of view he saidchristopher spalding an expert in planet formation at princeton university and a coauthor of dr cartiers study says his modeling