Meteorites rained life into Earth, says study

Sankar Chatterjee, a Texas Tech University palaeontologist,

 suggests it may have rained from the skies and started in the “bowels of hell”.

Meteorite bombardment left large craters on Earth that contained water and chemical building blocks for life, which ultimately led to the first organisms 4 billion years ago, an Indian-origin scientist suggests.

How life began on Earth has baffled humans for millennia.

Now, research from a Texas Tech University palaeontologist suggests it may have rained from the skies and started in the “bowels of hell”.

Researcher Sankar Chatterjee believes he has found the answer by connecting theories on chemical evolution with evidence related to our planet’s early geology.

“This is bigger than finding any dinosaur. This is what we’ve all searched for — the Holy Grail of science,” Dr. Chatterjee said.

Thanks to regular and heavy comet and meteorite bombardment of Earth’s surface during its formative years 4 billion years ago, the large craters left behind not only contained water and the basic chemical building blocks for life, but also became the perfect crucible to concentrate and cook these chemicals to create the first simple organisms.

Dr. Chatterjee’s research suggests meteorites can be givers of life as well as takers. He said that meteor and comet strikes likely brought the ingredients and created the right conditions for life on our planet.

By studying three sites containing the world’s oldest fossils, he believes he knows how the first single-celled organisms formed in hydrothermal crater basins.

“When the Earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago, it was a sterile planet inhospitable to living organisms,” Dr. Chatterjee said.

“It was a seething cauldron of erupting volcanoes, raining meteors and hot, noxious gasses. 1 billion years later, it was a placid, watery planet teeming with microbial life — the ancestors to all living things,” he said.

Dr. Chatterjee presented his findings during the 125th Anniversary Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver.

Source: thehindu.com

Asteroid Defense Plan Overdue, Astronauts Say; UN Now Preparing For Impact

Fears about an "Armageddon"-like space rock collision have prompted the United Nations to create an International Asteroid Warning Group and a plan for deflecting an incoming asteroid.


Respected scientist-astronauts have been saying it for years: We need to prepare. But before the UN General Assembly approved new measures this month, no country had even been on the lookout for asteroids that might be on course to hit earth, Scientific American reports. As one Apollo astronaut, Rusty Schweickart, put it: "If we don't find it until a year out, make yourself a nice cocktail and go out and watch."

Planetary protection apparently isn't just a job for Bruce Willis. The threat is real. And, actually, "deep impact" has happened before.

In 1908, a meteorite exploded over a place called Tunguska in a remote part of Siberia. For decades no one was quite sure what flattened trees for miles around but caused no crater. Scientists later discovered the rock fell so fast (around 33,500 mph) and got so hot (44,500 degrees Fahrenheit) that it simply exploded several miles above the earth with the force of hundreds of atomic bombs.

Then in 1994, the same kind of thing happened again, only this time to our distant neighbor, Jupiter. A comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 splashed into the planet's gaseous surface, leaving bright scars visible from earth.

And just this February, Russia got splattered again with space debris when meteorite bits rained down on Chelyabinsk, injuring more than 1,000. Divers found a 1,300-pound fragment at the bottom of a lake.

"We are literally living in a cosmic shooting gallery," the group B612 says on its website. It adds: "The probability of a 100 Megaton impact somewhere on earth each and every year is the same as the probability of an individual being killed in an automobile accident each year — about .01 percent."

B612 has been urging space agencies and the UN to develop some kind of plan to both observe an impending collision and divert it far enough in advance that we don't have to worry. A rock of just average size could wipe out a city.

On Friday, scientists from the Association of Space Explorers gave a talk at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. "There are 100 times more asteroids out there than we have found. There are about 1 million asteroids large enough to destroy New York City or larger. Our challenge is to find these asteroids first before they find us," NASA astronaut Ed Lu, CEO of B612, told Scientific American.

Once we find one, there are a few options for what to do about it. The UN seems to be running on the general plan to fly something big into the asteroid years before it would reach us. A slight change in tragectory would send it off the collision course.

Another option: asteroid cannon. The Japanese space agency, JAXA, is doing reseach on asteroid composition and launching a space gun to fire a big metal bullet into a nearby asteroid.

Source: isciencetimes.com

Artist Nicolas Baier explores the ‘poetic potential’ of the cosmos

It’s an ethos that’s been fully embraced by Nicolas Baier over the past couple of decades. Now 46, the Montreal-born, Concordia University-trained multidisciplinary artist has become famous for finding what he likes to call “the poetic potential” in realms and materials not usually associated with the fine arts tradition. Like meteorites. In recent years he’s been methodically grinding down meteorites he’s bought or been given into very fine graphite particles, mixing them in an acrylic medium, then applying the black particles like paint to oval-shaped canvases. He puts the results into shiny aluminum frames, then snugly installs each canvas in a custom-made box that includes a photograph of the precrushed meteorite and a sheet with information on the age of the meteorite and where it was found.

Several of these paintings – called, aptly enough, Météorite 1, Météorite 2 (and so on) – are on display and for sale at the Galerie Division/Division Gallery booth Friday through Monday at the 14th Toronto International Art Fair.

For the full experience of the Baier oeuvre and his current enthusiasms, though, it’s best to go to Galerie Division’s sprawling Toronto outpost in funky Bloordale that is hosting a survey of recent work titled Transmission. It’s a decidedly cosmic show “about reaching what’s important, what’s at the base of everything,” Baier said the other day as he oversaw the exhibition’s installation. Which is one way of saying that if you’re interested in, say, precise acrylic paintings of the Higgs boson (“which just may be the most important particle in the universe”) or a black metal sculptural representation of a computer server “containing all the books of human history in all languages” or mirrors incised with triangles and polygons illustrating astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet’s theories about the dodacahedral shape of the cosmos, well, Division is the place to space. Laughed Baier: “It’s just my own very, very little participation in a science project.”

Transmission revels in the interplay of macro and micro. Neurones, a large (152 cm by 203) ink-jet print on matte paper, for instance, appears on first inspection to be something concocted by an Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s – that or bullet holes fired into a plaster wall. But it is in fact as advertised: two months’ worth of photographs of human neurons, painstakingly shot through a microscope, at exposures of between one and 1.5 seconds, then digitally assembled.

Thing is, for all its intimidating aroma of science and technology, Transmission is frequently ravishing to the eye. Indeed, it’s Baier’s hope that “you can enter this show with having any explanation from me and still enjoy it. I mean, when was the last time you looked at a DVD and put on the option of running the director’s commentary the first time you watched the movie? You never do that. But in museums they do it all the time! You have the piece and the written words on the walls and the voice-guides that explain everything to you. That drives me nuts!”

Certainly, no “explanation” is needed for the pleasure and the menace the viewer will experience upon encountering Vanité/Vanitas, a major hit last year as part of the Oh, Canada exhibition in the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Baier readily acknowledges that “as hard as I’ve worked on the other pieces here, it’s gonna steal the show. People supposedly stare at an art work, on average, for eight or nine seconds. This one? They’ll stand for 15 minutes. It’s crazy!’” Monumental in size (a cube – or cell? – roughly three metres by two metres by three) and construction cost ($250,000), it contains within its fluorescent-lit glass-and-mirror frame, an artist’s working environment in which everything – including a half-eaten breakfast, crumpled pieces of paper, a tangle of electrical cords – has been completely plated in aluminum, nickel and steel. Yet for all its many surfaces, shiny and transparent, it permits no human reflection. “Everything is dead, sterile,” Baier observes. “We are in the zoo of the human,” the installation a riff on the Baudrillardian notion that “the objects we create are the mirrors of ourselves.”

Asked if he feels his work is a sort of corrective to art’s relative neglect of advances in science and applied technology in its content, Baier side-stepped the question. “To tell you truth, I don’t want to enter into a kind of political way to see contemporary art and judge my peers and colleagues. It is as it is. I’m just trying to do my little thing. Maybe art has thought a little too much about itself. Maybe it needs to open a little bit more its eyes and ears and its head. Maybe. It’s not my field of discussion,” he shrugged. “For me, it’s time to lose. I prefer to work.”

At the same time, Baier is quick to deny that there’s something anti-human or utterly rarefied about his interests and his practice. Sure, he likes big ideas, philosophy, mathematics, thinking about the Big Bang Theory – but “the cosmos is everywhere,” he insisted. “It’s not a thousand miles from us. It’s inside you; it’s inside me; it’s this room. … The observations about the Higgs boson permit us to think that primary particles are almost all the same material. It’s just the different combinations, the juxtaposition, of these same materials, that makes this table metal, your flesh flesh, wood wood. So when I’m thinking of the cosmos it’s not a way for me to be far away from the human. It’s a way to be in touch with the most important things in human life.”



Nicolas Baier: Transmission is at Division Gallery, 45 Ernest Ave., Toronto through Dec. 21. Information: galeriedivision.com. Works by Baier are also on view at the Galerie Division booth at Art Toronto Oct. 25 through 28 (Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Front St. W.).

Source: theglobeandmail.com

Astronomers Discover the Most Distant Galaxy Yet

Its light blasted into space when the universe was only 700 million years old

Astronomers have found a galaxy far, far away - 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, to be exact.

Astronomers have found a galaxy 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, making it officially the most distant object ever detected.

A faint, infrared speck of light from this ancient galaxy, called z8_GND_5296, was spotted using the Hubble Space Telescope and one of the world's largest ground-based telescopes, a ten-meter telescope at Keck Observatory at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Light from this baby galaxy began its journey when the universe was about 700 million years old and just emerging from the cosmic mist left over from its birth, said Casey Papovich, one of the lead authors of the study and an astronomer at Texas A&M University in College Station.

The former record holder is a fellow youngster, an ultra-faint galaxy about 100 million light-years closer to Earth.

Past claims of galaxies at these extreme distances were mined from deep field images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But many of these would-be candidates turned out to be much closer than previously thought, according to Papovich.

"Some of our candidates have turned out to be very cold stars—brown dwarfs—in our own galaxy," he explained.

Redshift Reveals

The only way to confirm a galaxy's true distance, however, is to do follow-up measurements analyzing the spectrum of light emitted. This can enable astronomers to determine a candidate's redshift—how far its light is shifted into the red part of the spectrum—and thereby its distance.

Redshift occurs because wavelengths of light stretch out as galaxies move away from observers on Earth. So the higher the redshift number, the more distant the object from Earth.

Papovich's team found this faint galaxy's redshift was 7.5, compared with the previous record holder's 7.2.

"Until you have a redshift, there is always some doubt about the exact nature of the galaxy," said Papovich.

"All the other objects out there with claimed 'most distant galaxy' in their titles are candidates selected using only imaging, and no spectroscopic confirmation like what we have done here."

The find, described in a study published this week in the journal Nature, is expected to help researchers better understand the so-called era of reionization, when newborn hot, massive stars and their galaxies transformed the opaque hydrogen fog—which filled the cosmos in the first billion years after the Big Bang—into the transparent intergalactic space we see today.

"The galaxies themselves [in this era of the universe] would be filled with the newly formed, massive stars, many of which could be a thousand times the mass of our own sun," Papovich explained.

"We have yet to identify any conclusive evidence that these 'first-generation' stars exist in even this distant galaxy."

How Far Back Can We Go?

Can we push the record back even further, closer to the Big Bang?

Richard Ellis, an astronomer not connected to the study, says it is definitely possible. But we do not yet have telescopes powerful enough to do the job.

"We have the capability, in principle, to push to redshifts of ten and beyond, corresponding to a time when the universe was only 350 million years old, or only 3 percent of its present age," said Ellis, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

The conundrum for researchers is that looking at larger distances means looking further back in time. That means galaxies become ever fainter as we push closer to the birth of the universe and the Big Bang.

"For most of the early galaxies being seen by Hubble, there's little hope of confirming their distances with spectroscopy until we get powerful new facilities such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope," said Ellis.

"Ultimately, to chart the universe in detail at these early times, we need the next-generation facilities."



Source: National Geographic

Chebarkul X-Files: searching for extra-terrestrial life

The space wanderer wasn’t found at the bottom of Lake Chebarkul. In spite of numerous attempts, divers failed to find a 500-kilogram piece of the meteorite which was believed to have fallen there after the celestial body had exploded over Chelyabinsk.

Many residents of Chelyabinsk and its suburbs, if not each one of them, are going to remember the morning February 15, 2013, for many years. A bright flash and an explosion made the Chelyabinsk Krai population freeze. A heat wave of unbelievable force that followed shattered window frames rather than windows themselves right inside the buildings, damaged balconies and rooftops. The immediate outage of mobile and Internet connection got people thinking about the worst – the beginning of a nuclear war. The only thing seemed strange – a typical mushroom cloud wasn’t seen anywhere.

Today, almost ten months after the meteorite explosion, few things remind of a catastrophe in Chelyabinsk. Amid severe Ural winter, people and authorities repaired homes and other damaged buildings over the shortest period of time. Due to a lack of glass in both the city and the region it was brought from other regions.

However, the meteorite fall on the territory of the small town of Chebarkul may be even considered some kind of luck. Chebarkul is almost 300 years but came to prominence only over the last two decades. The residents of the town don’t hurry to refresh their memories of February 15 going to a local museum as only a flash, panic and rumors come to mind recalling that day. And an ice-hole which became a site of pilgrimage. In the summer, authorities arranged excursions to the lake where a red memorable buoy bearing an inscription “Meteorite fell here on February 15, 2013” was installed.

Only few people, especially young ones, are still under impression. Eight-grader Maksim says:

“We had a physical education class when all of a sudden we saw a bright flash in the sky. Then an explosion followed. Everyone thought a plane or a rocket had crashed but a teacher explained to us that a meteorite fell. We were really scared. And later, during an IT class we started reading about meteorites on the Internet.”

The operation on raising the meteorite is being carried out at a distance from the town, on the opposite side of the lake. The entire operation was supposed to take up 28 days and to finish on October 4. Divers promised to raise everything they would find at the bottom of the lake. Few expected that a layer of slit had reached more than six meters and that the weather would be changing every half an hour. In spite of secrecy surrounding the operation, everyone in Chebarkul knows where divers live and work. A small wooden house, several iron storehouses and simple tents - that’s how modest water explorers live. All the necessary equipment is already on the lake.
Even though divers were lucky at the beginning of the operation raising small fragments of the rock from time to time, at some point the luck seemed to turn its back on them. First, weather began worsening which led to an abrupt water temperature drop. Besides, divers were forced to take off special gloves because of the slit and continue working like this, warming up their hands with sediment from the bottom of the lake.

Nevertheless, experts literally got their teeth into the slit. They didn’t lose hope until the very end as a sonar constantly detected large pieces of some hard foreign bodies. At some point they decided to expand the search area but the result left much to be desired as a big 20-kilo stone couldn’t pass for an extraterrestrial body.

However, this piece and 12 others were sent to Chelyabinsk Research University. Only four of them were identified as parts of the fallen meteorite. Thanks to the research, experts managed to establish the age of the “space visitor” which is about 4.5 billion years.

Source: http://voiceofrussia.com

Another mystery of Chelyabinsk meteorite unveiled

Many witnesses of the meteorite explosion over Chelyabinsk in February of this year said that they were able to see most interesting things. However, they are mistaken, because there are many things they could not see from the Earth surface. Thankfully, weather satellite Suomi was able to take pictures of all the interesting events that followed immediately after the explosion and provide pictures to scientists.

A renowned expert on small bodies of the Solar System Professor Valentina Prokofieva-Michailovskaya presented at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory under the framework of COSPAR program the work of her former student, now a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, the leading data analyst for "Suomi " meteorological satellite Nicholai Gor'kavyi "Small asteroid caused a huge dust ring around the Earth." The interesting satellite observations related to the results of the cosmic collision complete the knowledge of the developments in the Earth's atmosphere after the explosion of the meteorite on February 15, 2013.

A joint project of NASA and NOAA, weather satellite Suomi, was launched on October 28th, 2011. This man-made Earth satellite named after an American meteorologist Verner Suomi is the newest laboratory for the study of terrestrial and aquatic spaces, the atmosphere and clouds, snow and ice of the planet and its vegetation. Telescopes, video and photo cameras, and a variety of sensors are the eyes of the equipment looking down to the Earth. One of the sensors is a limb sensor that looks at the horizon with a thin blue strip of air over it.

During an orbital flight from the South Pole to the north, the limb sensor will measure the atmospheric glow 180 times a day. Three slots aimed at different parts of the horizon will obtain and record the spectra of about 500 atmospheric profiles.

Suomi orbits the Earth 14 times in 24 hours, providing 7,000 atmospheric profiles that can help build a three-dimensional picture of the dust level in the atmosphere. This unusual and unscheduled work had to be conducted later based on the data obtained by Suomi when the exploding fireball brighter than the sun illuminated the end of its trajectory over Chelyabinsk, giving a challenging task to the unsuspecting meteorologists.

The brightest flash of the explosion was followed by a "rain" of rocks, a large meteorite fragments, and dust. Fine dust stayed in the air and spread with the wind. Watching this from the ground proved difficult, as the hot air blast has rapidly gone up in a convective cloud, its velocity was 130 m / s, and some of the dust has been thrown to a height of 10 km.

As mentioned earlier, the numerous and complex equipment of "Suomi" captures various parameters. The data is processed by experts from different companies. The limb sensor under contract with NASA is led by SSAI. Experts process the data, and the processing is very difficult because of the need for a precise calibration of the devices, digitizing of the data and then building a model of the spatial features in the observations.

The first attempt to catch the event was made on February 18th, but was unsuccessful. Three sets of orbital data over Chelyabinsk on February 14, 15 and 16 of 2013 were studied, but the aerosol profiles were indistinguishable from one another, and a signal of "dust" from the meteor was not detected. It is well known that such dust stays in the air for a long time, so the assumption about the weakness of the dust cloud was rejected, and the scientists continued to search for its traces.

On February 19 the second attempt was made with a different approach, and it was clearly effective. All orbits for February 15-18 were taken from "Suomi". A bright aerosol spot with a maximum density at altitudes of 35 km was discovered at the latitude of Chelyabinsk. The main contribution was from the orbit on February 16. The aerosol was recorded over Siberia, many miles east of the explosion.

Data search on February 15 aimed at assessing the side slits of the limb sensor, and was successful. It turned out that the left slot of the sensor caught a dust cloud at an altitude of 30 km above Chelyabinsk five hours after the fall of the meteorite. The right slot on the previous orbit just in 3.5 hours 1,000 km east of Chelyabinsk found a dust cloud. But this signal was weaker, and indicated the altitude of about 40 km. That prompted a hypothesis about the east movement of the cloud over Siberia by strong winds.

Scientists Paul Newman and Arlindo da Silva, experts in atmospheric dynamics, built a computer model taking into account the movement of the wind in the stratosphere over Chelyabinsk. West wind at altitudes of 20 to 50 km was dominant, reaching 85 m / s. The highest part of the convective dust cloud swiftly moved to the east and reached Novosibirsk 3.5 hours later. The lower layers were moving slowly. In the model calculations on February 16 the dust stretched over Siberia, which was consistent with Suomi data. On February 18 the dust has reached North America and appeared in the skies over the Atlantic.

Four days later the dust was seen over Europe and gradually reached Chelyabinsk. For the next three months the dust ring stayed around the Earth at the altitude of 30-40 км. The article in Geophysical Research Letters on June 26 2013 for the first time presented the obtained data. A co-author of the work was A. Dadurov, a professor at Chelyabinsk University who first collected the meteorite dust on the snow around Chelyabinsk and who continued studying the dust component.

Later, on August 14, 2013 NASA published a press release with the study results.

The results obtained by Suomi are interesting because the fall of such a relatively small asteroid has produced large-scale consequences. The discovered dust plume served as a convincing evidence of the effect of small space bodies on the Earth. The reality of the asteroid danger was confirmed by the incident with Chelyabinsk meteorite that was heavily studied by scientists.

Tatyana Valchuk

Source: Pravda.Ru

Massive Star Explosion Seeded the Early Solar System, Meteorite Study Suggests

The explosive death of a star seeded matter into the solar system soon after its birth, analysis of a meteorite now reveals.

Earth and the rest of the solar system coalesced from a giant cloud of gas and dust more than 4.5 billion years ago. Many of the details about the galactic neighborhood in which the solar system arose still remain a mystery.

Meteorites contain some of the oldest material in the solar system, dating back to its formation. As such, researchers often analyze these objects in order to discover what materials were present when the sun, Earth and other planets were born. This study sheds light on where these solar system bodies might have come from.

All elements heavier than nickel are ultimately created by supernovas, giant explosions resulting from the deaths of stars. These explosions are bright enough to momentarily outshine their entire galaxies. Now, scientists analyzing meteorites have found that a supernova may have injected matter into the solar system within a small window of time after the solar system's first solids formed.

"This is evidence for supernova addition at the very start of our solar system, over 4.5 billion years ago," said the meteorite study's lead author,Gregory Brennecka, a cosmochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Brennecka and his colleagues investigated the Allende meteorite, which fell to Earth as a fireball in Mexico in 1969. Theyfocused on lumps within this meteorite known as calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions. These particles are some of the oldest objects in the solar system — they were the first solids to form in the protoplanetary disk that eventually gave rise to Earth and the other planets.

The scientists focused on a wide range of isotopes within the inclusions. In general, elements come in a variety of isotopes that differ in how many neutrons they possess in their atomic nuclei; carbon-12 has six neutrons, while carbon-13 has seven. (Both have six protons.)

Brennecka and his colleagues discovered these inclusions all had similar concentrations of isotopes. However, the concentrations were distinct from the average composition of the materials that make up the bulk of meteorites and the Earth.

The researchers propose the inclusions formed close to the young sun, possibly within a span as short as 20,000 to 50,000 years. As such, matter from a nearby supernova did not pollute these inclusions, as it did the outer regions of the protoplanetary disk. The inclusions later mixed with the material that went on to make the Allende meteorite and other rocks.

"Not only do we know that the supernova happened, we can see what material was injected and how it changed the elemental and isotopic composition of our solar system," Brennecka told SPACE.com.

These findings are consistent with the notion that the solar system developed in an active star-forming region of the galaxy. Stellar nurseries are often home to stars that go supernova.

Future research can aim to better understand the fingerprints of this supernova in other samples "and how much influence it and possible other supernovae had on the development of our solar system," Brennecka said.

Brennecka and his colleagues Lars Borg and Meenakshi Wadhwa detailed their findings online Oct. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.



Source: space.com

Physics professor warns ‘object with our name on it’ will hit Earth

Professor Michio Kaku calls Russian meteorite a "wake-up call" and touts the benefit of an early-warning telescope.

Physics professor Michio Kakuw warned on "CBS This Morning" about the threat of a large comet or asteroid colliding with Earth similar to the meteorite that struck the Russian city of Chelyabinsk earlier this year.

"One of these days, an object with our name on it is going to hit the Earth," Kaku said. Kaku, who currently teaches at City College of New York, called the Russian meteorite a "wake-up call."

According to Kaku, although "city-busting" sized meteorites only strike the planet about once every 100 to 200 years, the chances of football field-sized asteroids hitting the Earth are quite good because there is no program in place to prevent it. In order to help combat the problem, Kaku suggested building an early-warning telescope.

"It would cost chump change -- a few hundred million," he said. "But we have the giggle factor. Every time you talk to a politician about asteroids they start to giggle." He went on to say that the meteorite that struck Russia would have had the force of 20 Hiroshima bombs had it not exploded in outer space.

"The dinosaurs did not have a space program," Kaku said, "and that's why they're not here today. But we do have a space program but even then, we are sitting ducks."


Source: upi.com

Chelyabinsk meteorite: a message from God?

Divers have lifted more than 100 kg of space rock from Lake Chebarkul at the site of a meteorite explosion in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region. Laboratory tests showed that it was a typical chondrite, or stone meteorite, about 4.5 billion years old. Most meteorites are chondrites. While scientists are looking forward to getting new samples of the Chebarkul meteor, some people see it as God’s message to humanity.


Andrey Breyv, the head of the recently-founded Church of the Chelyabinsk Meteorite, argues that what happened over Chelyabinsk on February 15, 2013 was not a chance happening but a sign of what has long been talked of, namely that Russia may become the spiritual center of the world. Ten years ago, archeologists found an ancient human settlement, Akraim, near Chelyabinsk. God apparently chose that place for his “special information package” the world has been waiting for centuries, Breyv said in an interview.

“It’s a new package of knowledge designed to give us a new insight into the Aquarius Era. Finally, it has reached us in the form of a meteorite. We call that package ‘covenant’ by analogy with the Bible. Moses was the one who once received an information package which was more than just stone tablets with some symbols scribbled on it but a special message for Moses and his people. The world has changed a lot since then. The previous spiritual knowledge has been exhausted. The new package contains new scientific knowledge and a new code of moral norms and laws that will give humans a better life. What matters is that from now on spiritual and scientific knowledge will be a single whole,” Breyv said.

He claims that months before a meteorite splashed into Lake Chebarkul he and a few other people had felt God’s message approaching Earth.

“I had been preparing for it all my life, searching for a spiritual path. I possess extra-sensory capabilities and devoted my entire life to it. There are only twelve people in the world, the so-called lictors, who are able to understand the message, decode and interpret it. I am one of them. Before the meteorite, I had a protracted disease, the disease of shamans they call it. But the moment the meteorite struck, I felt much better. God sent me a revelation this summer. And then I realized that my spiritual search was over – I found what I had been looking for,” Breyv said.

He has got some 200 followers who communicate with each other through social networking sites. How many of them really believe in the “New Covenant” and how many are being driven by mere curiosity is hard to say. At present, the adepts have nothing beyond abstract faith, but they are planning to build a temple.

“Our main demand,” Breyv said, “is that the ‘tablets’ be lifted with care and handed over to our priests for further work. We want to build a temple where they could be stored and where any believer could approach the message not fearing to damage its information field. I am sure we will find an architect who will be inspired by divine power to create such a building. We think that the temple’s architecture should convey an image of the meteorite at the moment of explosion with columns rising all around it.”

An operation to recover what could be fragments of the meteorite from Lake Chebarkul where a large chunk of space rock presumably fell has been going on for three weeks now with Breyv closely following it. He always keeps some grains of meteorite dust in his pocket wherever he goes. When news spread that several fragments had been lifted, Breyv hurried to the scene to touch them.

The contract for the operation expires on October 4, but the contractor hopes that it will be prolonged. Sonars and other equipment point to a certain anomaly in the lake. Work is being impeded by a thick layer of ooze covering the bottom.




Source: http://voiceofrussia.com

Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_10_04/Chelyabinsk-meteorite-a-message-from-God-1542/

Scientists collect over 100 kilos of Chelyabinsk meteorite pieces

Scientists have collected over 100 kilograms of fragments from the meteorite that blasted in the skies of the Chelyabinsk region, Russian Academy of Sciences Space Research Institute spokesman Yuri Zaitsev told Interfax-AVN on Friday.

"Several institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences organized expeditions immediately after the [meteorite] event in order to collect meteorite samples and to study the drop zone. The total weight of collected meteorite fragments exceeds 100 kilograms, and the heaviest piece weighs 3.4 kilograms," he said.

Laboratory tests identified the Chelyabinsk meteorite as a LL5 chondrite (only 2 percent of regulate chondrite meteorites, which fall on the Earth, belong to this class, and the Chelyabinsk event is the largest of them), Zaitsev said.

The meteorite event occurred on February 15, 2013. The meteorite blasted above the Lake Chebarkul in the Chelyabinsk region.

The mass of the object, which hit the Earth atmosphere, was roughly estimated at 11,000 tons. It had a diameter of 16-20 meters, rammed the atmosphere at a speed of about 18 kilometers per second and fell into pieces at the altitude of approximately 23 kilometers.

Scientists presume the meteorite's parent body belonged to the family of Apollo asteroids, a class of asteroids with Earth-crossing orbits. Its approximate age is 4.5 billion years. Isotope tests and the structure of meteorite fragments suggest that the parent body collided with another space object about 290 million years ago.

Fonte: http://rbth.co.uk