Off-topic: The Sky Is Falling? Really?

[bellowbelle]

Okay, smart people....I need some help identifying what I am assuming is a meteorite.

 

It's ironic, because I just recently posted about how I'd worked-out the chords for 'The Rainbow Connection' for the EC, and the song is about star-gazing and all that, sorta....

 

Anyway, I'd just raked away the leaves from the driveway a few days ago. Our drive is partially paved, but partially gravel/dirt/grass/etc.. So, any new rocks or large things that showed up would be noticed, since I cleared the area.

 

So, I was pulling out of the driveway yesterday, and I happened to see this odd-looking blackened rock. I do remember that, either the night before or two nights before, very late, I was outside near that spot and thought I smelled the remains of a fire....assumed it was a neighbor's fireplace (they're a distance away, though, and it seemed closer) -- we don't use our fireplace.

 

It didnt' look like a normal rock -- too blackened. Also, I thought it was odd that I hadn't cleared it away when I raked.

 

Underneath the rock, the leaves and the ground were all black like ashes.

 

So...to get to the point...you can see the photos I took. There are 3 pics. One is at http://pbase.com/geranimom/pad and it's the most recently posted pic. The other two are at http://pbase.com/geranimom/moredailyphotos and are also the most recent, there.

 

Is this a meteorite, do you think? I think so.

 

We are far enough off the road and far enough away from neighbors that I doubt it came from any cars, fireplaces, etc..

 

I wondered if someone deliberately plopped it there, for some weird reason, but...I really doubt that.

 

So, anyway, that was kind of exciting. And I'm saving the rock, of course!

 

Edit added later:

See THIS FOLLOWING POST for links to the pics, once they are no longer 'the most recently posted' at my photo site.

Edited November 21, 2005 by bellowbelle

[Ivan Viehoff]

Wendy,

 

On the information and picture I doubt you have a meteorite. The telling sign is that your rock was hot enough to scorch the ground. Contrary to popular belief, meteorites are usually cold when they land. A hot rock that lands in your garden and burns the ground can't have been in the air very long, so probably it exploded out of a neighbour's bonfire.

 

Here are some pages to help people identify if they found a meteorite.

Meteorite identification pages

 

Sorry to be a spoil-sport, with best wishes

Ivan

[Alan Caffrey]

Wendy,

I agree with Ivan - of course it would really help to have the dimensions and the weight of the object, I've seen objects very like this before and I think this is probably the remains of a bodhran. Hope this is helpful...Alan.

[bill_mchale]

Well meteorites can be somewhat hot when they hit... they usually only take a couple of seconds, 10 at tops to get through the atmosphere since they are traveling at roughly 20-70 miles per second.

 

That being said, I also doubt that it is meteorite... its surface just doesn't look fused enough to my eyes. You would probably be better off checking in an astronomy forum. You might want to try cloudynights.com out. If this was caused by a metorite, then it clearly is only a piece of a larger metorite.

 

--

Bill

[BruceB]

Wendy,

A fun mystery! Did you follow the identification link and do the steps? It does look like it has a fusion crust in the one photo. Is it magnetic? If it's not a meteorite, what is it? You don't live close to any other houses so it's not possible it came from a neighbor's fire as a rock exploding in a fire wouldn't travel far at all. Interesting about the burned grass. Let us know when you solve the mystery.

For me, this thread has been personally interesting. I have a smooth, round rock about the size of a golfball that is very striking. My father found it as a teenager while out playing with several of his brothers. He kept it all these years in a wooden box along with his WW2 dogtags and several other small items from his life. When I was a child this rock fascinated me and I looked at it often. My father died 5 years ago and my mom gave me the rock. It was the one item of my dad's I always wanted. It strongly brings back memories of him and also my childhood. From the link given it looks like it's a Moki Marble. I'm going to research this further now.

bruce boysen

[bellowbelle]

That's what bothers me, too, the fact that it apparently burned the ground -- I figure that a meteorite (or piece of one) wouldn't be that hot when it hit.

 

I did wonder if it was just a spot of blackened leaves, having nothing to do with the rock, since a lot of the dead leaves turn black. But, this does seem to be a specific burn, and the rock was on it, and the rock is also blackened.

 

I suppose a large bird (we have them!) could have carried-off a large, ash-covered rock....but, hmm. Doesn't sound right.

 

I wouldn't really be surprised if it was somehow from a neighbor's fire or something. It'd have to be some strange, extreme factor that caused it to fly so far, but....you never know! (We do have one neighbor that gets so involved in shooting off fireworks, illegally I assume, that it shakes the ground below us....maybe he's trying out a new musket or something!)

 

I did read through the identification steps (thanks for the link!). I've yet to see if it's magnetic.

 

I suppose....it's possible....somebody's doing some kind of witchy stuff or something. Wouldn't be the first time, in my life!

 

Or, maybe there was a sudden time warp and we were back in the days of King Philips War, when this whole town was burned to the ground....now I have a memento! (Uh, I doubt that one...)

 

Edit added:

Forgot to say...I'll let you know when I've tested its magnetics.

 

More editing:

I just realized that, as I post more photos is my albums, the rock pics won't be 'most recent'. So, here are links to the photos:

rock-in-question-1

 

rock-in-question-2

 

rock-in-question-3

Edited November 21, 2005 by bellowbelle

[Robert Booth]

Hmm... interesting.

Did any of the neighbors report a large shooting star that night or anything like it? I'm thinking that, since most meteorites are very small, -even a sand-grained- sized stone will make a visible tail- that a stone of the size you have would have been seen by someone or many people.

Time to write a song: the Night the Stars Fell on New England.

Oh, and don't forget the tin-foil hats to ward off alien mind control.

[Ken_Coles]

As a professional scientist I have been asked more times than I can count right now to give an assessment of a suspected meteorite. The first time this happened (around 1990) I was able to go to a colleague down the hall, the late mineralogist Henry Muller (an Englishman), and get a list of features to look for. The first thing I learned (and later experienced) is that 99 out of 100 suspected meteorites are nothing of the sort. Some dead giveaways I've seen in the past include the presence of vesicles (bubbles) in a black rock. I don't know of any known meteorites that are vesicular. Those are nearly always furnace slag. One person insisted his stone was from his grandfather's corn field in Kansas. That may be sir, but it is still furnace slag. My latest was handed me in the Carnegie Museum last summer by a visitor. We cut it open and found a piece of steel and none of the Widmanstatten patterns; I need to call the guy and tell him that.

 

In this case, not only is the fusion crust missing, but the texture inside looks like those glacial pebbles found all over Worcester County (or are you in Middlesex county Wendy?), Massachusetts. Looks like a crystalline rock (that means either igneous or metamorphic; perhaps granite?) to me, with some alteration minerals in the center of the broken surface - micas often weather to funny looking stuff like that. They certainly require water to form, which means this rock did not recently arrive from a dry place like interplanetary space.

And I am confident in saying it is very unlikely to stick to a magnet - I can see enough details to show that it is not iron-nickel. Hot did it come to scorch a spot in your yard? I dunno, how did a piece of furnace slag get in a Kansas corn field?

 

If you want an expert to vet it in person, I'd suggest the Geo dept. at U. Mass Amherst, as you'll get a more sympathetic reception there than someplace like the Peabody Museum at Harvard.

[Chris Timson]

Not only off topic, but off the topic of this thread. I just thought you might enjoy it, and somehow it seems related. Headline I just spotted on the BBC news web site:-

Woman admits trying to open plane door for a mid-flight cigarette

Chris

Edited November 21, 2005 by Chris Timson

[John Wild]

I think this is probably the remains of a bodhran. Hope this is helpful...Alan.

 

It would be extremely helpful if you are right.!

 

- John Wild

[Dan Worrall]

As a professional scientist I have been asked more times than I can count right now to give an assessment of a suspected meteorite. In this case, not only is the fusion crust missing, but the texture inside looks like those glacial pebbles found all over Worcester County (or are you in Middlesex county Wendy?), Massachusetts. Looks like a crystalline rock (that means either igneous or metamorphic; perhaps granite?) to me, with some alteration minerals in the center of the broken surface - micas often weather to funny looking stuff like that. And I am confident in saying it is very unlikely to stick to a magnet - I can see enough details to show that it is not iron-nickel.

 

Well, I'm a retired geologist, so I guess I could weigh in on this (although caveat emptor....I spent most of my career looking for oil, not meteorites!). I agree with Ken's assessment:

1) It looks like either a river-polished cobble or a glacially-polished cobble....very smoothly rounded exterior; unlike most meteorites but very common in your region.

2) It is, from a glance at your photo, an intermediate or perhaps felsic crystalline rock...perhaps an igneous diorite or granite, or maybe a metamorphic gneiss. You have all these in abundance in New England, and very few to no meteorites are like that. I'd need a closer inspection to go beyond that.

3) It isn't a magnetic specimen, I should say...and 90% of meteorites are.

3) It didn't much whack the ground either. The leaves are hardly smashed, just scorched. I suppose it might have bounced first and then landed more gently, but that doesn't feel right as an explanation.

If it doesn't look like a duck, or walk like a duck, or quack like a duck, it is unlikely to be Donald! I'd sneak over to the neighbors and see if they have a cobble lined fire ring somewhere. Maybe they stubbed a toe whilst roasting marshmallows, and then tossed the offending rock over the fence??

[bellowbelle]

Well, thanks for all the replies and info!

 

I'm going to give it to my daughter to take back to UMASS, to see what the geology department thinks, there. She'd already offered to do that, the day I found it, but, I hadn't wanted to part with my prize....now, I'm too curious NOT to!

 

It's not magnetic. I thought I sensed just a slight magnetism, but, nothing that stuck at all.

 

Whatever it is, it looks like it was in a fire. I do recall hearing, sometime within the past week or so (...day or night? Can't remember!), a loud boom. I stopped and said 'What was THAT,' then forgot about it. That was before I'd cleared the driveway, though, and probably I would have noticed this strange rock. But, I guess I could have missed it.

 

We often get loud booms. The US Army has a base not too far away....well, in Ayer (yes, Ken...I'm in Worcester County!), which is about a 30-minute drive, but, I think they do manuveurs or whatever here and there that rattle our sky. There are probably other sources, too. We live near a reservoir and sometimes I hear blasts that seem to come from there.

 

I'm wondering about (or, grasping at) one other thing; A day or two before I found the rock, a VERY low-flying helicopter went over our house. In fact, I thought it was going to land on our roof, wondered for a moment if they had some kind of problem. I don't know if somehow a burning rock could have fallen from it? (...a mid-flight rock-fling, to go with the mid-flight cigarette, maybe? )

 

Anyway, nothing makes sense. I wouldn't even think twice about it if it wasn't so blackened and there wasn't a burned spot on the ground.

 

As for deliberate sinister actions of people, well....one never knows. Depending on where you live and what's popular at the time, and various societal factors....stuff happens! I can't say that it doesn't bother me, but, really, there's no point in letting it. Higher powers prevail, is my guess.

 

Anyway...on with my quest. I'll let you know if UMASS finds gold in it or something! Um...that is, if I get it back, after that....heheh.....gee, it could help pay the next tuition bill! That would be nice.

 

Edit added:

Re loud booms...if the rock projected from any surrounding house, that was quite a journey. So, I doubt that one.

Edited November 22, 2005 by bellowbelle

[GrahamBradshaw]

For me, this thread has been personally interesting. I have a smooth, round rock about the size of a golfball that is very striking. My father found it as a teenager while out playing with several of his brothers. He kept it all these years in a wooden box along with his WW2 dogtags and several other small items from his life. When I was a child this rock fascinated me and I looked at it often. My father died 5 years ago and my mom gave me the rock. It was the one item of my dad's I always wanted. It strongly brings back memories of him and also my childhood. From the link given it looks like it's a Moki Marble. I'm going to research this further now.

bruce boysen

 

I also found a strange rock in the 1950s whilst playing in a friend's garden. W would have been about 9 or 10 at the time. This object was like a golf ball - about 5cm in diameter - and had a distinctly metallic feel to it. It was spherical (but not perfectly) and smooth. For some reason, I decided to see if it would break, so smashed it down onto the concrete floor, when it shattered. Which probably means it was rock. Inside, it was hollow, with a white crystalline substance sticking to the outer shell which was about 1 cm thick. There also seemed to be a small amount of white liquid inside.

Ever since I have tried to find out what this object was, and this is the first time anybody has described anything remotely similar. As you can tell from the detailed description I am able to give after the passing of nearly 50 years, this event had a profound effect on me, and I always thought there was something faintly mystical about this object.

I must go and google Moki Marble.

Graham

 

Have just googled, and I am pretty sure that the object was a Moki Marble. A bit strange though, considering it was found in a back garden in Surrey, England!

Edited November 22, 2005 by GrahamBradshaw

[Alan Day]

Quote Graham Bradshaw

"This event had a profound effect on me".

 

This does answer a lot of questions Graham.

Al

[Tim Hall]

Oh, and don't forget the tin-foil hats to ward off alien mind control.

 

 

Sadly, this doesn't work.

 

It's been tried.

 

Best,

 

Tim

[Robert Booth]

...Tin foil hats...

"sadly it doesn't work"

 

HA! That's what THEY want you to think!

[Ivan Viehoff]

they usually only take a couple of seconds, 10 at tops to get through the atmosphere since they are traveling at roughly 20-70 miles per second.

 

This might be true of the kind of meteor which wiped out the dinosaurs, but in relation to every-day meteorites, I think that this is precisely the misconception. Meteors do hit the atmosphere at such speeds (see below), but unless they weigh many tons they are essentially stopped by the atmosphere well before they hit the ground. As a result, the last part of their journey is no faster than if they had been dropped out of a hot-air balloon. As sky-divers will know, an object thus dropped reaches a terminal velocity from which it accelerates no more (the velocity when air resistance matches gravitational attraction), and for a potato-sized rock it is of the order of 50-100m/s. (1m/s is 2.23 mph). Typical meteorites reach this terminal velocity at somewhere above 5,000m-20,000m altitude. So it takes the typical potato-sized meteorite minutes rather than seconds to hit the ground from atmosphere entry. The heat produced by the ram pressure of the deceleration from the collision with the atmosphere is sufficient to melt the surface to a depth of 1-2mm, (hence the typical fusion coating which appears absent from this rock), but this heat has largely dissipated by the time it lands.

 

To see this must be correct, observe that at a ground collision speed of 20 miles/second, you wouldn't find potato-sized meteorites lying around but large holes in the ground, as happens on the moon. On earth large holes in the ground caused by meteorite strike are so extremely rare they are tentatively estimated as a few per century. If a potato-sized rock, say 0.25kg (half a pound), did hit the ground at 30,000m/s (about 20 miles/second), the collision energy would be (by half mass times velocity squared) 112,500,000 J (or 27,000 Calories, or in US-style cgs metric 1,125,000,000,000,000 ergs - just put that one in for a laugh). The explosion of 1kg of TNT produces about 4,600,000 J, so we can see that the collision energy would be about the same as exploding 25kg of TNT, which would make quite a big hole. At 100 m/s, the ground collision energy for a 0.25kg rock is only 1,250 J (or 0.3 Calories), which is why they survive. Even if we assumed that some small fraction of the initial momentum survived, and it hit the ground at say 1,000 m/s, we have now got 100 times more energy, and travelling the speed of a rifle bullet, enough to spread a bit of mud about.

 

Many meteors are in showers which are predictable by their date. So we deduce there are debris clouds which are roughly stationary in comparison to the earth's rotation around the sun, whose collision velocity is therefore roughly the earth's own velocity. The earth's orbit being about 150,000,000 km in radius, the earth moves around the sun at around 30,000 m/s, (about 20 miles/second). A few are coming the other way when they hit, so that's why the collision speed is occasionally rather higher. So Bill's meteorite speeds are a good estimate.

[CaryK]

I'm a geologist, but not a meteorite expert by any means. Still, I've had opportunities to examine both stony and metallic (iron-nickel) meteorite fragments at various times and they did not resemble the rock in your picture. If yours is a meteorite it looks like it might be the stony variety. Recommend taking it to your nearest university geology department where someone can get a close look of its texture and mineralogy and give you a more definitive id. Interesting occurrence. Good luck.