Meteorites | Universe Today

Maybe we're not as old as we think (or feel?). The interstellar stuff that was integrated into the planets and life on Earth has younger cosmic roots than theories predict, according to the University of Chicago scholar Philipp Heck and his international team of colleagues.

Heck's team analyzed 22 interstellar grains from the Murchison meteorite. Dying sun-like stars flung the Murchison grains into space more than 4.5 billion years ago, before the birth of the solar system. Scientists know the grains formed outside the solar system because of their exotic composition.
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Classify this under new of the weird. A Russian scientist claims that aliens downed the Tunguska meteorite 101 years ago to protect our planet from devastation. Yuri Lavbin says he found unusual quartz crystals at the site of the massive Siberian explosion. Ten crystals have holes in them, placed so the stones can be united in a chain, and other have drawings on them. "We don’t have any technologies that can print such kind of drawings on crystals," said Lavbin. "We also found ferrum silicate that can not be produced anywhere, except in space.”

OK, just a few holes in this story, too.
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A miniature meteorite unlike any other has been discovered in Antarctica. The tiny rock, known as MM40, is the first achondritic basaltic micrometeorite ever found on Earth. Detailed analysis shows it has an unusual chemical composition the researchers say raises questions about where it originated in the Solar System and how it was created. "We have basaltic meteorites that are thought to come from an asteroid called 4 Vesta and we also have basaltic meteorites from the Moon and Mars," said Dr. Caroline Smith, curator of meteorites at the Natural History Museum, London "But MM04's chemistry does not match any of those places. It has to be from somewhere else."

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Officials are now saying the bright fireball seen over Virginia in the US on Sunday was probably a natural meteor event and not part of a Russian rocket, a reversal from yesterday's initial analysis. Space.com reported that an official from the U.S. Naval Observatory believed the loud boom and flash of light seen in the skies over Norfolk and Virginia Beach was likely the second stage of the Soyuz rocket that launched Expedition 19 to the International Space Station last Thursday. However, U.S. Strategic Command has since reported that the rocket re-entered Earth's atmosphere near Taiwan, on the other side of the world, several hours after the reports of the fireball. So both its timing and entry location rule out the rocket as the explanation for the fireball. But the investigation is continuing to determine exactly what the object was.
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Remember in October 2008 when Asteroid 2008 TC3 hit the scene – literally? This was the first asteroid that was predicted –and predicted correctly — to impact the Earth. Luckily, it wasn't big enough to cause any problems, and its path was over a remote area in Africa. It streaked into the skies over northern Sudan in the early morning of October 7, 2008, and then exploded at a high 37 km above the Nubian Desert, before the atmosphere could slow it down. It was believed that the asteroid likely had completely disintegrated into dust. But meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens thought there might be a chance to recover some of the remains of this truck-sized asteroid. And he was right.

Never before have meteorites been collected from such a high altitude explosion. Additionally, as it turns out, the assembled remnants are unlike anything in our meteorite collections, and may be an important clue in unraveling the early history of the solar system.
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A fireball seen over Texas during the daytime on Sunday, Feb. 15th, triggered widespread reports that debris from the recent satellite collision was falling to Earth. The FAA even issued a statement that airplanes should watch for falling debris. However, those reports and statements were premature. Researchers have studied video of the event and concluded that the object was more likely a natural meteoroid about one meter wide traveling more than 20 km/s–much faster than orbital debris. Meteoroids hit Earth every day, and the Texas fireball was apparently one of them. Additionally, a spokeswoman for U.S. Strategic Command said the fireball spotted in the Texas skies Sunday was unrelated to the satellite collision. And as always, the Bad Astronomer was on top of it from the beginning, so check out his first post here (which includes several updates as the news broke), and a follow-up here. There were other fireballs, too….
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Astronomers have analyzed the cometary fireball that blazed across the sky over Europe last year and concluded it was a dense object, about a meter (3.2 feet) across and with a mass of nearly two tons – large enough that some fragments probably survived intact and fell to the ground as meteorites.

Last July, people in Spain, Portugal and France watched the brilliant fireball produced by a boulder crashing down through the Earth’s atmosphere. In a paper to be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomer Josep M. Trigo-Rodríguez, of the Institute of Space Sciences in Spain, and his co-authors present dramatic images of the event. The scientists also explain how the boulder may originate from a comet which broke up nearly 90 years ago, and suggest that chunks of the boulder (and hence pieces of the comet) are waiting to be found on the ground.

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Incoming! Hundreds of small objects, mostly asteroid fragments, impact Mars every year. Sometimes, like on Earth, objects break up in the Martian atmosphere. But Mars' atmosphere is much thinner than Earth's, meaning more stuff hits the ground on the Red Planet. If a bolide breaks apart and but doesn't disintegrate, the result can be a cluster of craters. The image here is an example of that, with this group of recently made small impact craters. Although small Martian crater clusters are common, this example is unusual because there is a dark line between the two largest craters. The HiRISE scientists hypothesize that atmospheric breakup created two nearly equal-size objects that impacted close together in space and time so the air blasts interacted with each other to disturb the dust along this line. Wow!
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Last night, the Colorado skies played host to a dazzling fireball event. The meteor blasted through the atmosphere, detonated and outshone the Moon by 100 times. It is therefore expected that there were many eyewitnesses, and the Cloudbait Observatory (5 km north of the town of Guffey, CO) is appealing to people to report their accounts of the fireball. Fortunately, the observatory managed to capture an all-sky camera video of the early morning explosion.

The Colorado fireball comes shortly after a similar event over Canada on November 20th, where over two dozen meteorite fragments have been recovered from agricultural land. We wait in anticipation to see if this huge Colorado fireball produced any similar fragments, but eyewitness accounts will be critical to aid such a search…
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Several more fragments have been found from the 10-ton asteroid that exploded over western Canada on November 20, including a head-sized piece weighing 13-kilograms (28 lbs). Imagine that landing on your house or car (or head!). University of Calgary professor Alan Hildebrand, who is leading the search estimates there could be 2,000 fragments per hectare (about 2.5 acres) in the area near where fragments were initially found. The asteroid is becoming known as the Buzzard Coulee fireball, named after the picturesque, but luckily uninhabited valley where the first pieces were located. Check out the website of Bruce McCurdy of Edmonton Space & Science Foundation and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, who has joined in the search for more meteorite images.
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On Nov. 27, planetary scientist Dr. Alan Hildebrand from the University of Calgary and graduate student Ellen Milley brought reporters to a site where they have found numerous meteorite fragments from the bolide that streaked across the sky in Western Canada on Nov. 20. The area where the meteroite fragments were found is called Buzzard Coulee, about 40 kilometers from the town of Lloydminster, on the Alberta-Saskatchewan border. There, around a frozen pond, numerous small rocks and pebbles could be seen that the scientists said were from the meteorite. No large chunks were spotted, however, reporters said.
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Fragments of the big meteorite that lit up the Canadian skies across the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan last week have been found, according to a report in CBC online. University of Calgary scientists said they located several meteorite fragments late Thursday afternoon, and they were planning to take reporters to the site Friday. Planetary scientist Dr. Alan Hildebrand and graduate student Ellen Milley believe thousands of meteorite bits from the 10-ton bolide are strewn over a 20-square-kilometre area. The video above of the fireball was taken by a video camera in a police car in Edmonton, Alberta.
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The search is on for fragments of a 10-ton rock that lit the sky over western Canada last Thursday evening. Scientists estimate that at the time it hit Earth's atmosphere, the asteroid fragment weighed approximately 10 tons and was probably about the size of a desk. It exploded with the force of 300 tons of dynamite, and hundreds of fragments of the meteorite weighing more than 50 grams (1.76 ounces) are likely strewn over a wide area. The speed of entry was relatively slow, about 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) per second, well below the average 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) per second of most meteorites, said University of Calgary researcher Alan Hildebrand. Amateur astronomers, meteorite hunters and rock hounds have been combing the prairies in western Canada for a 10-ton meteorite that lit the sky and exploded with the force of 300 tons of dynamite, according to experts from the Canadian Space Agency.
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In an effort to understand how organic chemicals might survive after a period in the vacuum of space and then violent re-entry through the atmosphere, scientists have uncovered some interesting results. Last year, the ESA/Russian Foton-M3 mission was launched to test the effects of microgravity on various biological samples. However, a sample of Orkney rock had a harder journey than most. Attached to the outside of the craft, this sample underwent extreme heating during the descent toward the plains of Kazakhstan. Although most of the sample was vaporized, scientists have unveiled results that the sample still contains very obvious signs that it once harboured life. These exciting results set new limits on how organic chemicals may survive unaltered for long periods in space before plunging through a planetary atmosphere, plus it raises some interesting questions into how future searches for extraterrestrial life may be performed…
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Meteorites and asteroids from the inner solar system could be responsible for Earth's store of precious metals such as platinum and iridium, brought to our nascent planet during the period of Late Heavy Bombardment, about 4,000 million years ago. Dr. Gerhard Schmidt from the University of Mainz, Germany, has calculated that about 160 metallic asteroids of about 20 kilometers in diameter would be sufficient to provide the concentrations of these metals, known as Highly Siderophile Elements (HSE), found in the Earth's crust. "A key issue for understanding the origin of planets is the knowledge of the abundances of HSE in the crust and mantle of the Earth, Mars and the Moon. We have found remarkably uniform abundance distributions of HSE in our samples of the Earth's upper crust. A comparison of these HSE values with meteorites strongly suggests that they have a cosmo-chemical source," said Schmidt.
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