An extremely rare meteorite that has the same make-up as the primordial solar system goes on public display for the first time on Friday at the Natural History Museum in London.

The Ivuna meteorite landed in Tanzania in 1938 and has since been broken up into samples, the rest of which remain in the hands of private collectors. The Natural History Museum bought the largest lump in 2008 from a private enthusiast in the US.



The black, satsuma-sized space rock dates back to the birth of the solar system some 4.6bn years ago, before the Earth had formed. It is one of only five in the world with a ratio of chemical elements that, save for hydrogen and helium, almost exactly matches that of the sun.



The meteorite is a carbonaceous chondrite and has a lot of water locked up in its minerals. Up to a fifth of the rock’s weight is bound water, with other constituents being organic compounds that are considered the building blocks of life.



Meteorites like the Ivuna rock may have brought water and vital compounds for life on Earth when they slammed into the surface of the fledgling planet billions of years ago.



Ashley King, a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, said: “These meteorites are a unique record of conditions that existed at the time over 4.5 billion years ago, before the Earth had formed. They are the primordial building blocks of our Solar System.”



A piece of Libyan desert glass. This is sand which has been subjected to the the extremely high temperatures and pressures that occur when a meteorite lands. Photograph: Jonathan Fuhrmann/NHM London

When carbonaceous chondrites reach the Earth, they start to react in the air. But the museum’s Ivuna sample has been stored in a case in pure nitrogen for most of its life to preserve the pristine material.



Researchers at the Natural History Museum believe that studying the meteorite might give them a more accurate record of the sun’s composition than measuring the sun’s surface itself.



“Ivuna is actively used in our research, and it is fantastic to be able to show visitors a unique specimen that is older than Earth itself,” said King. The speciment will go on display at the museum’s free after-hours event, Science Uncovered, on 25 September.



Sara Russell, head of mineral and planetary sciences at the museum, said the Ivuna meteorite had recently been used to cast doubt on claims that the orbiting XMM-Newton observatory had seen dark matter streaming from a distant cluster of galaxies.



“It highlights that we need to learn more about our own galactic back yard. By studying the solar system we can learn abut how matter behaves in distant galaxies. At the Natural History Museum, we are using meteorites such as Ivuna, which dates from a time before planets existed, to understand the composition of primordial material at that time,” she said.

