This week we had a meteorite strike in France on Monday, Italy on Tuesday, and Texas on Wednesday.
French piece
Italian fragments
(I don’t have a photo of Texas pieces, but some have been found.)
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times…
If we hadn’t mistaken their scientific observation platform for a Chinese spy balloon and shot it down we’d still be fine.
Thanks Biden.
We send them Chuck Berry and they send us…rocks. Fuck ‘em!
I just noticed that the meteorite fragments in the second photo are sitting on aluminum foil (as the top one is more obviously). So kudos to both groups for knowing the recommended procedure for keeping a fresh meteorite as uncontaminated as possible.
Clearly the aliens misunderstood Chuck singing, “Hail, hail, rock and roll.”
It was probably the red Tesla Roadster that really sent them over the Moon in a rage. And now they’re enacting their revenge.
Perhaps we can launch Elon on a one-way trip to Saturn on a Falcon as penance. Maybe they’ll appreciate the irony. If they don’t, we will.
Seriously there @Darren_Garrison , that’s really a cool set of finds.
Is there any evidence or supposition that they’re connected in any way? All part of one shower, fragments of one larger rock, etc.?
I don’t know. Three witnessed, recovered falls in three days has never happened before (I don’t know if three in three months has happened before.). It is conceiveable that we could spend days passing through the debris of one asteroid breakup–after all, periodic meteor showers are spread out over several days.
All being witnessed falls, they will be able to calculate the rough orbit of each of them, and they will all be studied in great detail (including with ion microprobes) and know if they came from the same parent body, so we will have a definite answer soon. I’m guessing really freaky coincidence because randomness is lumpy, though.
Texas.
We had a muffled explosion earlier. Maybe in the (too close for comfort) next county.
If any thing turns up I’ll report back. If … resistance isn’t futile, that is.
Do meteorites make a War of the Worlds style crater?
I can’t help thinking that @Hatchie is connected to this somehow.
ETA this thread is why I think that way. I’m tellin’ ya, it’s a ‘spiracy!
Have any radioactive meteorites ever been found. Indeed, are they even possible?
Every time I hear, “meteorite,” I think, “Andromeda Strain.” Damn you, Michael Crichton!
I’m no expert, but the Texan one looks like a very different composition than the Italian one: I’d guess that the Texan one is mostly iron, while the Italian one looks like chondritic. Though some space-rocks are a mixture of both, so that doesn’t rule out them being a larger object that broke up.
When the Peekskill meteor fell back in 1992, it was a tremendous stroke of luck that it fell in America on a Friday evening in October, because it meant that there were a lot of people outdoors with camcorders, recording high school football games, and so we had multiple video recordings of the fall, which was then unprecedented. Nowadays, though, with everyone carrying a movie camera in their pocket, I guess that’s become routine.
Wow, the huge yellow crater is even visible in the satellite photo.
You, go to your room!
No, and no. There can be some slight enrichment in radioactive elements on the very surface of the meteoroid thanks to cosmic rays hitting atoms and to a dusting of solar wind particles (the same way the moon accumulates the much mentioned tritium) but it would be trace amounts and that part of the meteoroid would ablate away before it hits the ground anyway. Meteorites are made from the exact same elements as the Earth itself, and the radioisotopes in them have gone through the same number of half-lives.
(Which leads to one “maybe”. In theory, a meteorite could fall that was tossed out of a very young, nearby solar system that contained an abundance of newly cooked radioisotopes from a recent supernova. But having that happen is–how should I put it–somewhat unlikely.)
…is one more than two times.
I think “Creepshow”.
Meteorcrap!