Jump to content
Science Forums

Meteorites


Turtle

Recommended Posts

  • 3 weeks later...
Amen to that!

A million bucks for a 30 pound piece of metal. Count me in on the hunt!

 

Battery good to go. To Finland then? :)

 

YLE News

 

'Super-Meteor' Lights up Northern Sky...

The fireball was apparently caused by a space rock striking the atmosphere over Northern Ostrobothnia and then exploding over Finland. Ursa says the rock may have weighed some 200 kilogrammes. However it was not clear on Saturday whether any meteorites fell to the ground. ...

 

PS Dear Finns' date='

DO NOT, repeat [u']DO NOT[/u] simply hand over any fragments of this bolide you find on your property! Finders, keepers! meteorites traceable to a specific sighted bolide are premium priced. I wouldn't be surprised if material from this fall is worth at least $2 US per gram.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 weeks later...
Amen to that!

A million bucks for a 30 pound piece of metal. Count me in on the hunt!

 

And apparently it's best not to lose hold of things hit by meteorites, if this is any indication from a recent meteorite aution in New York City. :xparty:

 

Some of the world's most famous meteorites have gone under the hammer at a New York auction house in what is said to be the first sale of its kind.

 

The pieces were drawn from collections across the world and many examples are richly coloured and intricately patterned, some bearing gemstones.

 

A piece priced at $1.1m (£0.53m) did not sell but an iron meteorite from Siberia fetched $123,000 (£60,000).

 

And a US mailbox hit by a meteorite in 1984 sold for $83,000 (£40,000).

 

BBC NEWS | Americas | Space rocks go under the hammer

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 months later...

We had a nice fireball light up the entire NW recently, and the hunt is on for meteorites from it. :)

 

 

PSU prof still hunting for NW meteorite site | Local News | kgw.com | News for Oregon and SW Washington

A Portland State professor thinks he’s getting warmer in the hunt for a meteorite. The meteor was seen across a wide area of the Pacific Northwest early February 19' date=' including the Portland Metro area. Professor Alex Ruzicka and his geology students work in the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory.

...

Ruzicka told the PSU Daily Vanguard that his team thinks they’ve pinpointed the impact are to within a 10-mile radius northeast of Pendelton.

 

Scientists said sonic booms indicated at least a portion of the meteor likely survived entry into earth's atmosphere, slowing from 50,000 miles an hour to just 4,000. [/quote']

 

A meteorite tied to a specific fall is worth twice its weight in ...well... meteroites. :)

 

Here's more on the sightings. I did have my night-sky cam running to catch fireballs as usual, but I was pointed in the wrong direction and zoomed in all night & saw nothing of it when I reviewed the recording the next day. :Bump2: :D ;)

 

Universe Today » Meteor Blazed Above the Pacific Northwest Tuesday, February 19

Link to comment
Share on other sites

OMG!

 

Now I know what happened to my gate....

 

Never thought of a meteor before, looked like it had been kicked by bruce lee but the security cameras caught nothing, noone entering the property.. just there and then smashed the next day. Wish the camera reached all the way to the gate the slow-mo footage would have fetched a pretty penny... Must get a metal detector out there, but so many pipes, need a schematic of the place.

 

An archaeologist picked one up off a beach of rocks when with him one day exploring maori middens. (NZ indigenous people's old food dumps).

 

It was a black/brown rock not spherical but close, pitted with 1 cm-ish hollows in several places.

 

He reckoned it was worth quite a bit.

 

Now - lottery or meteorites - I think meteorites are distinctly better odds although I won a grand sum of $30 today on the lottery... Anyone?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Some more research has been done on the Carancas, Peru, meteorite site from 2007. It seems that other mysteries are hidden behind the curtain.

 

Big Crater Carved By Mysterious Meteorite | LiveScience

 

The meteorite was a common type, a chunk of silicate rock called a stony meteorite. Usually a projectile such as this would be slowed down by the drag of Earth's atmosphere. By the time it landed, it would be traveling at the normal terminal speed of any object falling from the sky, and would probably dint a hole in the ground, but not a crater.

 

"Essentially Carancas threw us this high-speed curveball," Schultz told SPACE.com. "The mystery is why it didn’t slow down and how did it make it all the way to the Earth intact to form a crater? These are questions we have to resolve."

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Some more research has been done on the Carancas, Peru, meteorite site from 2007. It seems that other mysteries are hidden behind the curtain.

 

Big Crater Carved By Mysterious Meteorite | LiveScience

 

Good stuff Maynard. :bdayhappy_balloons: No one in the link gave this, so I offer the possible explanation for the meteor not slowing/breaking up during atmosphere passage, that it was already aeordynamically shaped before starting entry. :D Weather today is partly cloudy with afternoon high-speed meteors. ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Monetary value aside, it is amazing what a treasure trove of information on space that the right meteorite provides. :hihi:

 

Meteorites may be remnants of destroyed dwarf planet - space - 13 March 2008 - New Scientist Space

Two rocks found together in Antarctica are chunks of a dwarf planet that was smashed apart early in the solar system's history, detailed studies suggest. Other remnants of the proto-world may still be floating around in the asteroid belt, and might be identifiable by the spectrum of the sunlight they reflect.

In the solar system's first few tens of millions of years, collisions between rocky objects and the decay of radioactive isotopes melted the interiors of large objects. Magma oceans – perhaps hundreds of kilometres deep – lapped over the Moon, the Earth, and other large bodies, allowing dense material to settle towards their centres in a process called differentiation.

The two meteorite pieces, called GRA 06128 and GRA 06129 after the Graves Nunataks area of Antarctica where they were found together in 2006, show evidence of such differentiation – which suggests they came from a massive body.

That's because the two objects are made mostly of a mineral called feldspar, which constitutes about 75 to 90% of their volume. ...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...

This is way cool! :) :hihi:

 

 

WASHINGTON — For the first time scientists matched a meteorite found on Earth with a specific asteroid that became a fireball plunging through the sky. It gives them a glimpse into the past when planets formed and an idea how to avoid a future asteroid Armageddon.

 

Last October, astronomers tracked a small non-threatening asteroid heading toward Earth before it became a "shooting star," something they had not done before. It blew up in the sky and scientists thought there would be no space rocks left to examine.

 

But a painstaking search by dozens of students through the remote Sudan desert came up with 8.7 pounds of black jagged rocks, leftovers from the asteroid 2008 TC3. And those dark rocks were full of surprises and minuscule diamonds, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature. ...

Comcast.net: Astronomers catch a shooting star for 1st time

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 years later...

fragments of the meteor seen over california earlier this week have been found. :bounce: although the Leonid meteor shower was happening at the time, Leonid meteors are small dusty & pebbly remnants of comet Tempel-Tuttle. this large meteor -estimated to have been as large as a small bus- is not related to the Leonids. finding meteorites associated with a witnessed meteor/fireball shortly after a sighting makes them all the more valuable for scientific study as the iron in meteorites rusts and they otherwise weather. this weathering can result in lost information. in addition, knowing the trajectory means it is possible to calculate the general direction of its origin, yielding even more information on rocks from space.

 

there are now a number of automated meteor-hunting cameras and the network is growing. recording the same meteor on 2 or more cameras allows researchers to triangulate the path and give a good approximation of where any surviving fragments may have fallen as meteorites, as well as calculate possible origins. :read:

 

Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance(CAMS) @ Ames Research Center

Mission statement - CAMS is an automated video surveillance of the night sky in search of meteors to validate minor showers in the IAU Working List of Meteor Showers. Stations are located in California.

 

SpaceWeather.com report

April 26, 2012

SPACE ROCKS FOUND: Meteorite hunters have found fragments of the minivan-sized asteroid that exploded over California on April 22nd. ...

 

other news report: >> Meteorites found in Sierra Nevada likely from giant fireball over weekend, old as solar system @ Washington Post

 

RENO, Nev. — Robert Ward has been hunting and collecting meteorites for more than 20 years, so he knew he’d found something special in the Sierra foothills along the path of a flaming fireball that shook parts of Northern California and Nevada with a sonic boom over the weekend.

 

And scientists have confirmed his suspicions: it’s one of the more primitive types of space rocks out there, dating to the early formation of the solar system 4 to 5 billion years ago. ...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 4 years later...

30 Tons Meteorite Found In Gancedo, Argentina

 

 

Scientists have discovered a meteorite weighing over 30 tons in northern Argentina on September 10.

The meteorite was found in the town of Gancedo, 1,085km north of capital Buenos Aires, Mario Vesconi, President of the Astronomy Association of Chaco, said on Monday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7OGZpVbI6I

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...