This curious rock fell from the sky above Sanchore, Rajasthan, northern India on Friday, alarming residents with a huge explosive sound and leaving a one-foot crater where it fell. The object is palm-sized and weighs 2.7kg. According to police, it was very hot. They've since turned it over to the Geographical Survey of India. From The Tribune:

"We have inspected the site where the object had fallen from the sky with a loud sound. Prime facie, it appears to be a piece of meteorite, which has been seized and kept safe as it shall be sent to the lab for further examination."

The officials concerned also got it tested in a private lab located at the jeweller's shop in Sanchore who confirmed that the piece had metallic properties of Germanium, Platinium, Nickel and Iron (10.23 per cent of nickel, 85.86 per cent of iron, platinum 0.5 per cent, cobbit 0.78 per cent, geranium 0.02 per cent, antimony 0.01 per cent niobium 0.01 and other 3.02 per cent).

A massive boom heard Wednesday night over Puget Sound on the northwestern coast of Washington was most likely an exploding meteor. Or that's what They want us to believe anyway. The American Meteor Society registered a dozen reports. Video above. Keep your eyes on the upper left of the frame.

"The more I read the more inclined I am to believe this was a fireball (which is a meteor that is larger and brighter than normal)," the American Meteor Society's Bob Lunsford said. "I'm certain now that this was a meteoric event."

From KOMONews:

Most meteors' explosions are heard about a minute or two after they explode due to the time it takes the sound to reach the Earth's surface, Lunsford said. Sound travels at 767 mph in standard atmosphere conditions, indicating this fireball exploded some 35 miles away.

"If this was larger than normal then the sound could have originated from a higher altitude. So a delay of 3 minutes is entirely possible," Lunsford said. "Meteors become visible at a height of around 50 miles so your estimate is well within that range."

Lunsford said because there was a boom, it’s very likely there are small, rock-sized pieces of the meteor somewhere on the ground. When a meteor causes a boom, it’s “pretty far down” in the atmosphere.

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On November 30 1954 in Alabama, a nine pound meteorite broke through the ceiling of Anne Hodges' living room, bounced off her stereo system, and hit her in the side while she was asleep on the sofa. Hodges suffered a bad bruise. The National Museum of Natural History has a piece of the rock in their collection and, as Smithsonian magazine reports, it's long been thought that Hodges is the only individual in recorded history confirmed to have been hit by a meteorite. Now though, researchers at Ege University, Trakya University, and the SETI Institute report that a fellow in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq is actually the first documented case of a meteorite striking a human being. It happened on August 22, 1888 and unfortunately the falling meteorite killed the man and left another paralyzed. From the scientific paper in Meteoritics & Planetary Science:

[The evidence comes from] three manuscripts written in Ottoman Turkish that were extracted from the General Directorate of State Archives of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey. This event was also reported to Abdul Hamid II (34th sultan of the Ottoman Empire) by the governor of Sulaymaniyah. These findings suggest other historical records may still exist that describe other events that caused death and injuries by meteorites.

image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell Read the rest

During Monday's super wolf blood moon lunar eclipse, some observers noticed a tiny flash on the surface. Turns out that was a football-sized meteorite smashing into the western surface of the moon. This was the first time a meteorite impact was spotted during a total lunar eclipse. Now, scientists will study images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to hopefully find the new crater, perhaps as large as 33 feet across. From National Geographic:

An eagle-eyed viewer on Reddit spotted the potential impact during the eclipse and reached out to the r/space community to see if others could weigh in. The news spread quickly on social media, as people from across the path of totality posted their images and video of this tiny flicker of light...

“The Earth and the moon are in such close proximity that observing the impacts on the moon can help us learn a lot more about the frequency of impacts on Earth,” explains (University of Toronto planetary scientist Sara) Mazrouei, who recently authored a study detailing an ancient spike in large meteor bombardment on the moon, and thus on our planet.

...Seeing the aftermath of smaller impacts on airless worlds like the moon can help scientists learn about the effects of larger strikes on all kinds of worlds—including our own, Madiedo says.

“By knowing what happens with smaller impacts, you could know what could happen with larger impacts without really studying a large impact on Earth.”

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Fireball is Werner Herzog's forthcoming documentary "about meteorites and comets and their influence on mythology and religion," according to Variety. He's once again collaborating with British geoscientist Clive Oppenheimer, his partner on the volcano documentary Into the Inferno. From Variety:

The producers of “Into the Inferno,” Andre Singer and Lucki Stipetic, are both on board “Fireball.” Herzog and Oppenheimer will co-direct. They will once more go globe-trotting, this time to visit sites that yield insight into comets and meteorites and help them understand what they can tell us about the origins of life on Earth.

A man in Michigan had used a "rock" as a doorstop for 30 years to hold his heavy barn door open. He knew it was a meteorite – the farmer who sold him his house in the 1980s had told him that he and his father had seen it hit ground in the 1930s and dug it out of its crater when it was still warm. But the man didn't think much of it, until a fireball hit Michigan last January. He then got to thinking, and brought the rock to Central Michigan University's geologist Mona Sirbescu to have it analyzed.

It turned out to indeed be a meteorite, and a valuable one at that, worth over $100,000.

The Smithsonian as well as a museum in Maine are thinking about purchasing it. Read the rest

Listed as a Seymchan Pallasite Olivine Meteorite, this beautiful item is priced $18,000 but they're accepting offers.

Mineral Origin: Magadan District, Russia, 1967 Diameter: 2.77" / 70.3 mm Weight: 2 lbs 4.3 oz / 1029 grams / 1.029 kilograms

...Seymchan is a Pallasite meteorite found in the dry bed of the Hekandue River in the Magadan District, Russia, near the settlement of Seymchan in June 1967 ...

Pallasites consist of a nickel-iron matrix packed with Olivine crystals and account for less than 2% of all known meteorites ... and unlike many meteorites, Seymchan is stable and rust resistant!

Due to the rarity of the Seymchan material and the large cut loss incurred to make a sphere, very few have been cut! ... and we can almost guarantee, another one this size is unlikely to be ever cut!

In April 2016, a Seymchan Pallasite sphere sold at Christie's Auction for over $10,000! ... and it was only 434 grams! ... less than half the size of this one! In October 2012, a 548 gram Seymchan Pallasite sphere sold for $13,000!

m0nster0 posted this 3mm-thick slice of a Seymchan pallasite meteorite to Reddit. He says its "one of my favorite bits of space rock." I can't argue with that! He bought it on eBay from this guy, who sells some stunning specimens. Read the rest

One afternoon in 1954 Ann Hodges of Alabama was napping on her couch when a meteorite the size of a software came through the ceiling, bounced off a radio and hit her in the thigh. She escaped with a giant bruise, but the meteorite inflicted much harsher damage in an unexpected way. The Air Force took the meteorite. Hodges and her husband Eugene fought to get it back, but their landlord, Birdie Guy, said the meteorite belonged to her and she sued to get it back. She settled with the Hodges, taking $500 in exchange for the rock.

From National Geographic:

Ann later suffered a nervous breakdown, and in 1964 she and Eugene separated. She died in 1972 at 52 of kidney failure at a Sylacaugan nursing home.

Eugene suspects the meteorite and frenzy that followed had taken its toll on Ann. He said "she never did recover," according to the museum.

From Slate:

That rock, even at the time, was worth a fortune. To give you an idea, a second piece was found not far away by a farmer on his property. He was able to sell it and buy a new house and a car. And his piece was less than half the mass of the Hodges chunk, with less notoriety as well. Were something like that to happen today, the meteorite would sell for a lot of money.

Hodges’ legal problems were so great that her mental and physical health suffered. She and her husband divorced, and she died of kidney failure in 1972 at the relatively young age of 52.

New analysis of the dagger buried with King Tut confirms that the weapon was made from an iron meteorite. They used X-ray fluorescence spectrometry to study the dagger, found on Tut's mummified body by Howard Carter in 1925. Daniela Comelli of Milan Polytechnic's department of physics and her colleagues have even identified the most likely meteorite used to forge the dagger.

"We took into consideration all meteorites found within an area of 2,000 km in radius centered in the Red Sea, and we ended up with 20 iron meteorites," Comelli told Space.com. "Only one, named Kharga, turned out to have nickel and cobalt contents which are possibly consistent with the composition of the blade."

From Space.com:

The study shows the ancient Egyptians attributed great value to meteoritic iron for the production of precious objects, possibly perceiving those chunks of iron falling from the sky as a divine message.

The most ancient Egyptian iron artifacts, nine small beads excavated from a cemetery along the west bank of the Nile tomb in Gerzeh and dated about 3200 BC, are also made from meteoritic iron hammered into thin sheets.

"It would be very interesting to analyze more pre-Iron Age artifacts, such as other iron objects found in King Tut's tomb. We could gain precious insights into metal working technologies in ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean," Comelli said.

"King Tut's Blade Made of Meteorite" Read the rest

A video recently posted on YouTube appears to show a falling meteoroid just missing a skydiver in Norway. Fast forward to 1:31 to see it streak past.

"If you work out the mathematics, the odds of a 1-kilogram- rock (2.2 lbs.) passing within some 30 feet (9.1 meters) of a person on Earth's surface within 10 minutes is about 1 in 500 billion," Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office told Space.com. "You have a 1,000 times greater chance of winning the Powerball lottery."

UPDATE: Over at Slate, Phil "Bad Astronmy" Plait wrote, "It is entirely possible that what the video shows is a smaller rock that fell out of the skydiver’s parachute." Read the rest

Carlo Zapponi created Bolides, a fantastic animated visualization of meteorites that have been seen hitting the Earth. The data source is the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society's Meteorite Bulletin. "The word bolide comes from Greek βολίς bolis, which means missile. Astronomers tend to use bolide to identify an exceptionally bright fireball, particularly one that explodes." Bolides Read the rest

Here is Heritage Auctions' description for the Gibeon Mask -- "an incomparable iron meteorite"

Closing out the Gibeon section is arguably the most aesthetic iron meteorite known to exist. In 1992, indigenous tribesmen in Namibia's Kalahari recovered this matchless specimen with the aid of a metal detector. It is extremely rare for meteorites to have naturally formed holes, and rarer still when the holes are positioned in the matrix in such a way as to yield a magnificent aesthetic specimen-let alone the highly zoomorphic example seen here. Defined by the two adjacent hollows that perforate its mass and separated by perfectly sculpted ridges, there is an exquisite asymmetric balance between this meteorite's two sides: the outward flanging of one side is offset by the larger hollow and more prominent opposing crest.

In addition to the mechanisms involved in the shaping of aesthetic iron meteorites described in the previous lot, there is one other critical detail that was of particular significance to the current example: the moment of extraction from beneath the Earth's surface. If removed several hundred years earlier, this specimen would not have been the perfectly singular zoomorphic evocation before us. If removed several hundred years later, the holes would be far too large and outsized. Adorned with a sumptuous natural patina from its stay in the Kalahari and accompanied by a custom armature and Lucite dome, this is an incomparable meteorite from the finest collection of aesthetic iron meteorites in the world. 195 x 212 x 177mm (7.66 x 8.33 x 7 inches) and 9.37 kilograms (20.66 pounds)

Provenance: The Macovich Collection, New York City.

This is a very cool, behind-the-scenes peek at how researchers at the Smithsonian deal with the problem of studying meteorites without contaminating said meteorites.

This is a big issue. We study meteorites to learn things about what has happened and is happening outside our own planetary system. If, in the process of that, we end up covering the samples with the detritus of Earth, then the message gets muddled. If you're studying a meteorite, you want to be reasonably sure that you're not accidentally studying dust or bacteria from this planet. Clean rooms like the one in this video make it easier to examine these samples in a way that is less destructive.

Learn more about the Smithsonian's collection of Antarctic meteorites.

Video Link Read the rest