Out of this world

Down to earth … Jeff Kuyken holds a stone meteorite. Photo: Michael Clayton-Jones



You can pick up a tiny meteorite for $10 or so, or a large chunk for more than $1 million. Size and weight matter, as do aesthetics, but a better indicator of value is the source.

Grape-size fragments from a famous 1947 iron meteorite shower in Russia called Sikhote-Alin are relatively common, but those originating from the moon are in greater demand.

The former sell for $10 while a lunar specimen of the same weight is worth $5000.

Meteorites from Mars are even more valuable on a cost-per-weight basis. A one-gram piece is worth about $1000 and their value is expected to rise, given the latest Mars rover landing.


In October 2007, a $1 million meteorite was offered for sale through Bonhams New York. This controversial item was a fragment of the Willamette meteorite, the largest found in the US and the ninth-largest in the world. Discovered in 1902, the Willamette was donated to the American Museum of Natural History. It weighed more than 16 tonnes, or did until a considerable chunk was removed in the 1990s and sold to a private collector in New York.

When put on the market in 2007, this off-cut was expected to fetch more than $US1 million before representatives of an American Indian tribe from Oregon claimed they were ''deeply saddened'' by the proposed sale of what they considered to be a sacred artefact. It didn't sell.

The best result from the Bonhams auction was a 99.5-kilogram Sikhote-Alin specimen, which sold for $US122,750 (including buyer's premium). Several others fetched more than $US50,000. But perhaps the real treasure was the Claxton mailbox, the only known private letterbox damaged by a space rock. It sold for $US70,000.

Interest in meteorites has boomed over the past 10 years and the Bonhams sale no doubt helped inflate prices - artificially so, according to some collectors. They say these well-publicised auctions are aimed at wealthy speculators and that more realistic values can be found at rock collectors' fairs. Two of the more famous are held annually at Tucson, Arizona and Denver, Colorado.

The US is the biggest market but there's a strong trade in Europe and serious collectors in Australia including Jeff Kuyken, who became fascinated by rocks from outer space as an 11-year-old.

Kuyken now works in fibre optics but his passion continues. He runs the Meteorites Australia website, which sometimes lists items for sale, and he is president of the International Meteorite Collectors Association (IMCA).

The latter's website is a useful starting point for anyone wanting to buy meteorites. You can check the bona fides of any seller who claims to be part of the IMCA there.
Kuyken says there have been many unbalanced reports on meteorite values in the media over the years.
''Many concentrate only on the highest-value pieces, which makes for an interesting story,'' he says. ''However, it has a follow-on effect, where people who may actually find one have completely unrealistic expectations of its value.''

The chances of finding a $1-million meteorite are, well, a million to one - or more. It's more likely that any you do find - in the real world or on the internet - will be worth closer to the $10 mark. And if you find them in Australia, you are limited by various state and federal laws.

In WA and SA, authorities have the right to seize meteorites, even if you find them in your own backyard.
The exportation of Australian meteorites is now forbidden under federal law. This has had a severe impact on values in Australia. Kuyken's estimate is a reduction by 50 per cent to 90 per cent. Specimens found in most other parts of the world can be imported or exported freely within Australia.

Reports of meteorite activity are relatively common. The most recent fall of note was at Sutter's Mill in California in April this year. The 800 grams of fragments found so far are fetching about $US2000 ($1920) a gram online. The largest single piece found weighs 44 grams.

There have been significant falls in Australia but the most recent, at Murchison in Victoria, was recorded in 1969. It is regarded as one of the most important events scientifically, but in monetary terms, Murchison meteorites are worth much less than more newsworthy fragments from California.


Fonte: smh.com

Italian museum makes Mars meteorite find amid NASA mission

'Martian meteorites are only samples on Earth'

 Florence, August 23 - The Planetary Science Museum of Prato, near Florence, announced the discovery of a new meteorite from Mars on Thursday, as NASA's Curiosity Rover explores the Red Planet in a mission that could demonstrate the Red Planet was once hospitable to organic life. Scientists at the museum a few days ago determined that an in-house metorite named NWA (North-West Africa) 7387 actually originated from Mars. The new discovery was announced just as NASA's $2.5-billion Curiosity started practising moving around on its own in Mars and extending its robotic arm together with its attached camera, drill, and dirt-studying instruments to help it explore the plant's surface and let it take terrain samples. The museum came to its conclusion thanks to other labs and institutes who sent meteorites and space fragments for comparison. "The discovery of a Martian meteorite is always a very important moment for science," said museum researchers Vanni Moggi Cecchi and Stefano Caporali. "It's opportune to note that to date none of the various Red Planet missions returned with physical objects, so Martian meteorites at the moment are the only material testimony that exist in relation to this fascinating place". The NWA 7387 label was given, as always, by the Meteoritic Society, a world leading organization in the study of extraterrestrial material The same researchers in 2008 identified another Martian meteorite called NWA 4222 as well as an equivalently rare lunar stone called NWA 6687 in 2010. Aside from a wide variety of standard meteorites, the Museum also hosts a series of very rare samples with atypical characteristics considered extremely precious by the scientific community. (photo: stock meteorite picture)



Fonte: gazzettadelsud.it

Looking at the Night Sky Through the Past

It is not easy to imagine the sleepy town of Springfield, Vermont as a former hub of industry, innovation, and intrigue. With its gently-decaying factory and warehouse buildings shouldered up against the moody Black River, its tidy little Hole in the Hill Bar, tucked away actually inside a hill, and cafés and restaurants that close all day on Sundays, it seems almost forgotten by the world. But Springfield was once a pivotal and cutting-edge leader in manufacturing, and—during World War II—was on Germany’s “top ten list” of strategic bombing targets. Springfield was home to the machines that made the machines that won the war. While the town may have played a pivotal role during wartime, its other bequest to the world could not possibly make for any greater contrast. In addition to being a critical cog in the fabrication of bombs, tanks, artillery shells, and fighter planes, Springfield gave life to a quiet, contemplative, and remarkable intellectual revolution. It is the birthplace of amateur astronomy and was, most definitely, a town in the right place at the right time.

James Hartness moved the Jones & Lamson Machine Tool Company (J & L) there in 1888 and the Fellows Gear Shaping Company opened shop eight years later. Hartness was an avid amateur astronomer, and completed construction of his groundbreaking Hartness Turret Telescope, situated imposingly on his own grounds, in 1912. It is connected to Hartness House by a narrow and eerie underground tunnel that enabled Hartness to view the heavens, enclosed and in comfort, even during the chilliest of Vermont winters. In an era before highway lights, electric billboards, and modern sports stadiums, Hartness’ skies must have been as black as a villainous raven.


The term “Renaissance Man” could not be more aptly applied to any individual than Russell Porter. Born in Springfield in 1871, he was an architect, telescope builder, wonderfully talented artist, and daring Arctic explorer. Porter went to work for J & L, and Hartness, in 1919 and, later in life, worked on the 200-inch telescope at Mount Palomar. Porter and Hartness shared a keen interest in mirror making and telescope design, and with the abundant energy provided by the Black River Falls, a wealth of innovative manufacturing equipment, and Hartness’ position as superintendent of J & L, almost any moving part that the prototype stargazers dreamed of was theirs to build.

Hartness encouraged and supported Porter, and in 1921, the 50 year-old artist/engineer gave a class in mirror making to sixteen students, including Oscar Fullam and Frank Whitney, both of whom went on to be noted optical instrument designers in their own right. Two years later, that small group became the Springfield Telescope Makers, and the world of astronomical observation changed forever. Porter and friends built the Stellafane clubhouse in 1924 (from the Latin for “star shrine”). It survives to this day and is now the locus of the annual Stellafane astronomy convention.

The Springfield Telescope Makers hold their annual general meeting at the Stellafane club house. Porter’s Turret Telescope, completed in 1930, is in the foreground

In the early 1920s, Porter put his considerable talents to work on designing a telescope that was not only easy to use, but could be left outside year-round. Part Art Nouveau sculpture, part lawn ornament, and part scientific wonder, the Porter Garden Telescope was an exquisite creation made of cast bronze, with a hinged lid that cleverly concealed and protected its delicate hand-ground mirror, which the owner would use to study the night sky.

The original retail price of $250 was later raised to $450 and, in 1923, that was the price of a grand automobile. They were expensive indeed but, for the first time, telescopes that had previously been almost exclusively the purview of prominent scientific observatories, were available to the public. That, combined with the instruments built by Fullham, Whitney, and others, brought the capability of exploring the cosmos from garden lawns to the people.

Vintage telescopes by Fullam and Whitney in the subterranean museum at Hartness House in Springfield, Vermont

Each of Porter’s Garden Telescopes bore a serial number, stamped into the metal, and it is rumored that 75 were built, though the highest documented example is #54. The whereabouts of most are today unknown, and some must still languish forlornly and unrecognized in garages and sheds. Those that survive are cherished and admired, and a fine example recently sold at auction for $18,000. One, stained green with patina, somewhat weathered and with various components missing, stands proudly, if somewhat crippled, on the lawn in front of Hartness House. Another, in immaculate condition, resides at the end of the tunnels below the house—dank corridors that could easily have been a filming location for Dr. Who. Once an illegal speakeasy (and the outline of the old bar can still be seen demarcated in flaking floor paint), the subterranean rooms are now a museum dedicated to preserving the history of the earliest days of amateur astronomy. Berton Willard, curator of the museum, a highly regarded member of the Springfield Telescope Makers, and Porter’s biographer, gave me a private tour of the exhibit, and I was entranced from the first moment. “It’s not a coincidence that it [amateur astronomy] grew up here,” Willard told me. “In what is known as Precision Valley,” after the tool-making industry that once dominated the area.

Author, curator, and astronomer Berton Willard with one of the surviving Porter Garden Telescopes

That industry is now long gone. Feverish workers and gear cutting machines remain only as whispers in fading memories of the elderly, and the once-thriving manufacturing complexes are abandoned and dozing, slowly crumbling alongside the Black River like majestic fossils. But Springfield’s industrial might and legacy of discovery live on on in the eyes of amateur astronomers across the country and around the world, particularly during the annual Stellafane convention. Every August, over a thousand telescope makers and stargazers gather on Breezy Hill, just outside of town, where they delight in the speckled stars peppering dark Vermont skies. Russell Porter’s children—telescopes of brass, wood, aluminum, and even cardboard, gently cradling meticulously ground glass lenses and mirrors—peer relentlessly into the cosmos, illuminating our imaginations, and baffling our minds with unanswerable quandaries of time, space, and distance.

Vacant industrial buildings slumber beside the Black River

Occasionally, a bright meteor streaks overhead, prompting cheers, applause or an: “Ooh, did you see that one?” from the assembled astronomers clustered in the blackness upon Breezy Hill. And, at last, I fully understand the valediction that is universal among stargazers: “I wish you clear skies and dark nights!”


All photographs and text by Geoffrey Notkin
© Geoffrey Notkin. All rights reserved.


Fonte: http://tucsoncitizen.com

Honduras Investigates Alleged Meteorite Crash

Tegucigalpa, Aug 20 (Prensa Latina) Specialists with the Permanent Contingency Commission (COPECO) are now in Trojes area, in the eastern Honduran department of El Paraíso, to investigate the alleged crash of a meteorite.

  According to the inhabitants of that region near the border with Nicaragua, a fireball crossed the sky on Saturday night and then they heard a loud explosion.

A COPECO statement clarified that no specialized agency reported a meteorite passing by the Central American region, nor has reported the loss of an aircraft.

Copeco and the astronomical observatory of the National Autonomous University of Honduras said their experts in the field are investigating what happened in that region and will report as soon as possible, while they called on people not to generate speculation to avoid uncertainty.



Fonte: PLenglish.com

Expert rejects meteor claim

 An astronomer from the Manitoba Museum has discounted the claim of a woman who said she found pieces of a meteorite on her property near Riding Mountain National Park.
Nicole Nixon said she experienced a bright light and loud noise Tuesday morning, then found two rocks she believed to be meteorites the following day.
Scott Young, astronomer at the Manitoba Museum and Planetarium, said Nixon "contacted us at the museum several times before, including last week, before Tuesday's alleged sighting.
"Interestingly, she sent us pictures of different rocks with the same story, which look nothing like the rock pictures that ran in the article, and aren't meteorites either."
On Friday, Nixon said the rocks she called Young about the previous week were from Portugal, and that Young is angry with her because she wouldn't give him some of her other meteorites.
"We've had a lot of problems with Scott Young. We had a huge meteor fall in 2009 here and Scott Young wanted some of the meteorites from that fall for free," Nixon said.
Young said it is difficult to tell from pictures alone, but the rocks in the pictures Nixon provided don't have the features normally found on meteorites.
Meteorites are usually dark, not porous (there aren't any air bubbles in them because their isn't any air in space), they don't have any crystals in them (quartz is very common on Earth but not found in meteorites), they are often magnetic, and very heavy for their size.
Nixon's description of the what happened doesn't add up, Young said.
"If you see a flash in the sky, the rock isn't falling where you are because this happens when the meteor's still 50 kilometres up and still moving at a couple hundred kilometres an hour," Young said.
"Once it slows down and stops burning it falls on a ballistic trajectory and it usually lands dozens or a hundred kilometres from where people saw it."
Such a large event is usually seen and heard for more than 100 kilometres, but Nixon has so far been the only person to have reported it.
Nixon said there are 10 other witnesses, but refused to provide their names or contact information for verification.
When meteorites as large as the rock Nixon found (70 kg) hit the Earth, their sonic boom and impact register on seismographs that are monitored in Manitoba.
Young said his office is contacted when this occurs but wasn't contacted about any recent activity.
Even though the Perseids meteor shower occurred recently, Young said there has never been a meteorite associated with a meteor shower.
A meteor shower occurs when the Earth passes through the trail of dust left behind by a comet, which is composed of tiny bits of sand and ice.
On average, the Earth is hit about once a day from meteors, but they usually come down in an ocean or in remote areas.


Fonte: winnipegfreepress.com

Possible meteorites found after bang, light

BRANDON -- A woman living near Riding Mountain believes she found meteorites close to her home.
On Wednesday, she found two fragments with surfaces like "old elephant skin,"àone the size of a football, the other larger, weighing about 25 kilograms.
In the middle of the night on Tuesday, Nicole Nixon's house suddenly became bright and there was a loud bang. She thought something hit the house.
"It was a terrifying experience. At first I thought it was a bomb," she said.
In the morning, Nixon went outside to find her horses cut, likely from hitting barbed wire after being spooked.
While walking through her property looking for the cause of the ruckus, she found what she believes to be two meteorites lying on shale rock.
Nixon lives about 25 kilometres north of Neepawa on the southeast corner of Riding Mountain National Park.
"I don't know 100 per cent what it is, but because of the sonic boom and the light, I think it's probably a meteor."
Nixon sent pictures to professor Jeff Young from the University of Manitoba, but he was unable to verify they were meteorites using only a photo. Nixon intends to get the rocks tested to see if they really are meteorites.
Over the weekend, bits of rock from the tail of a comet plunged through our atmosphere at a rate of up to 80 each hour during the annual Perseids meteor shower -- one of the most spectacular meteor showers the Earth receives.


Fonte: winnipegfreepress

Convincing Evidence found for Extra-terrestrial Origin of Quasicrystals

Results from an expedition to far eastern Russia that set out to find the origin of naturally occurring quasicrystals have provided convincing evidence that they arrived on Earth from outer space.

Writing in IOP Publishing’s journal Reports on Progress in Physics, Paul J. Steinhardt and Luca Bindi reveal that new, naturally occurring quasicrystal samples have been found in an environment that does not have the extreme terrestrial conditions needed to produce them, therefore strengthening the case that they were brought to Earth by a meteorite.

Furthermore, their findings reveal that the samples of quasicrystals were brought to the area during the last glacial period, suggesting the meteorite was most likely to have hit Earth around 15,000 years ago.

“The fact that the expedition found more material in the same location that we had spent years to track down is a tremendous confirmation of the whole story, which is significant since the meteorite is of great interest because of its extraordinary age and contents,” said Steinhardt.

In their report, Steinhardt and Bindi describe the expedition in which 10 scientists, two drivers and a cook travelled 230 km into the Koryak Mountains of far eastern Russia to pan one and a half tons of sediment by hand, and survey local streams and mountains.

The group of researchers was on the look-out for naturally occurring quasicrystals — a unique class of solids that were first synthesized in the laboratory by Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman in 1982. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2011 for this discovery.

The concept of quasicrystals was first introduced by Steinhardt and his student Dov Levine. Until their work, it had been believed that all solids, synthetic or natural, form ordinary crystals — materials whose entire structure is made of a single-type cluster of atoms that repeat at regular intervals, joining together in much the same way as identical tiles in bathroom tiling.

It was also thought that crystals could only have two-, three-, four- and six-fold symmetries; however, Steinhardt and Levine found a new theoretical possibility, which they dubbed quasicrystals. A quasicrystal has two or more types of clusters that repeat at different intervals with an irrational ratio, which allows all the symmetries that were thought to be forbidden, such as five-fold symmetry, to be possible.

Since their discovery in the laboratory, researchers have created over one hundred artificial quasicrystals that have been used in a variety of applications, from non-stick frying pans and cutlery to ball bearings and razor blades.

Only one natural quasicrystal has been previously documented: a sample in the Museum of Natural History in Florence, Italy, that was located and identified by the two co-authors and their collaborators in 2009. They found the sample to have the symmetry of a soccer ball, with six axes of five-fold symmetry forbidden to ordinary crystals. This triggered a remarkable investigation to find the place from which the sample came, which, as Steinhardt states, involved secret diaries, smugglers, gold prospectors and bears.

Eventually, the researchers found the person, Valery Kryachko, who had removed the sample from a remote area of Chukotka in the Russian mountains back in 1979.

In the summer of 2010, the researchers’ experiments indicated that the sample was meteoritic and had come from not just any type of meteorite, but a CV3 carbonaceous chondrite — a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite formed at the beginning of the solar system.

“Now, there was real motivation to turn this fantasy trip into a reality. It was a long shot, but if we could find even one sample there, it would prove the bizarre story we had put together beyond any shadow of doubt and provide new sources of material for studying this very strange meteorite that formed at the beginning of the solar system,” Steinhardt continued.

Now that Steinhardt, Bindi and their expedition team have collected even more samples from the original site in Chukotka, there are a number of questions that can be answered with further investigation.

“What does nature know that we don’t? How did the quasicrystal form so perfectly inside a complex meteorite when we normally have to work hard in the laboratory to get anything as perfect? What other new phases can we find in this meteorite, and what can they tell us about the early solar system?

“At the moment, we are at the tip of the iceberg,” said Steinhardt.


Fonte: Scientificcomputing.com