My Meteorite Piece
Phil sent me a rock. No, seriously - a space rock! I published the first half of his accompanying letter in tonight’s report, My Mighty Meteorite. This is the second half of his letter to both Ponzi and myself:
What you have here is a piece of shrapnel from this meteorite. Its composition is about 91% iron, 7.1% nickel, 0.46% cobalt, 0.26% phosphorus, and about 1% sulfur. There are trace amounts of gallium, germanium, and iridium (that last was the key element that lead scientists to understand that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a similar but much larger blast).
Most meteorites are stone. They come from asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. When a large body forms in a solar system, all the stuff making it up is at first mixed, like batter. But when it gets big enough, the heavy stuff - the metal - sinks to the center. So you need a big asteroid for that to happen, bigger than the Moon, so that its gravity is strong enough to differentiate it. Then it has to suffer a mighty blow from another huge asteroid, disrupting it, blowing it into billions of pieces.
What you’re holding in your hand is a piece of metal that was once deep within the core of a planetary-sized body that was destroyed by the impact of another planet-sized body, 4 billion years ago. It orbited the Sun, relatively untouched all that time, until that fateful day 30 millennia ago. It’s a piece of outer space brought to Earth in a fiery, violent decent that ended in cataclysm.
And now it’s yours.
[The first half of Phil's letter has been published elsewhere - and if you haven't figured it out by now, I'm very thankful for his gift. It's kinda like space copralite?]
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8 Comments
Bill Webb
August 22nd, 2006
at 3:31am
Further: that iron and those other bits of metal were created in the heart of a star, billions of years before the Solar system even existed.
Makes ya feel sort of small and insignificant, don’t it?
bnaivar
August 22nd, 2006
at 4:20am
Point of order….
Most meteorites are nickle-iron that’s how they survive entry through the atmosphere. Most METEORS are stone but very few survive to reach the surface of the Earth, where they can be called a meterorite.
Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer
August 22nd, 2006
at 9:31am
:-)
Aaron Pratt
August 22nd, 2006
at 11:44am
For some reason I keep finding meteorites on the beach, they feel unearthly heavy and attract magnetism (a good test to determine if they are real).
Some have weak magnetic pull so you need to tape a magnet on a piece of thread and swing it near the suspected meteorite, if it pulls in bingo! I got one on my desk right here and use it as a paperweight and often pick it up and dream about how small we really are.
Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer
August 22nd, 2006
at 1:50pm
Careful there. Lots of little things you find look like meteorites, but it’s rare that one actually turns out to be the genuine rock from space. Google Do a web search on “meteorwrong” to find out more.
Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer
August 22nd, 2006
at 1:50pm
Hmm, that was supposed to be a slight joke aimed at Google above, but the code I used failed, so read that as simply “do a web search”.
Jane B.
August 27th, 2006
at 5:06pm
well…i have a little question… is there any way i could find out if a so-called-meteorite is not just a rock picked up from the street? :) any features…or…something?
My Mighty Meteorite ~ Windows Fanatics
October 5th, 2006
at 1:06am
[...] The Bad Astronomy guy (not a bad astronomer, himself) performed yet another random act of kindness. He mailed me something out of this world: a meteorite! Not the entire thing, mind you - but a bit of “Canyon Diablo” history. Here’s the first half of his accompanying “letter of authenticity,” with the second half of the meteorite’s decsription continued in this piece on my meteorite piece post… [...]