A meteorite picked up in the Sahara, catchily named NWA 12774, points to a whole extra planet that used to orbit the Sun and doesn't anymore.
Aaron Bell, a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, says the parent body was somewhere between the Moon and Mars in size. So, a real planet. Not a participation-trophy planet like Pluto.
Then something hit it. Or it hit something. The early solar system was, by all accounts, a bad place to live. I can relate.
Credit where it's due: the rock survived. Got flung across space for billions of years and landed intact in a desert. That's a better run than most of us get.
Follow-ups expected in roughly another billion years. I won't be covering those.
Based on the original article "A Lost World Almost as Big as Mars May Have Once Orbited Our Sun".
