
Desert rock hints at a moon-sized world shattered in the Sun’s early days
A fist-sized Sahara meteorite called NWA 12774 is an angrite whose chemistry, analyzed with a new pressure-based barometer, implies it formed inside a large parent body—potentially Moon-sized—under high pressure and was destroyed during the solar system’s infancy. Its silica-poor composition points to a formation pathway different from Earth or Mars. If correct, this would be evidence for a vanished protoplanet whose debris helped seed the early planets; further independent checks on similar meteorites are needed to confirm the giant-parent picture.












