Most of Earth’s meteorites can be linked to just a few collisions within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, two new studies report, including a particularly cataclysmic impact event around 470 million years ago.
The upside to this discovery, published October 16 in Nature, is that it provides researchers with vital context: By knowing the return address of meteorites, scientists can more easily work out how and where the building blocks of planets came together to create the solar system we see today. The downside is that it may mean researchers have an extremely biased meteorite collection that can tell only a sliver of the story.