Public invited to hunt meteorites
Anyone with an unexplained object that has fallen in their back garden might want to check whether they have found a meteorite. More than 30 are believed to fall in the United Kingdom each year - but very few are ever identified. And the Open University is now encouraging the public to become meteorite hunters. A website will help people to discover whether any objects they find are really from outer space. The project is part of an Open University and BBC Two series, Stardate, which will encourage people to look for meteorites - which fall at a rate of more than one a fortnight, but mostly go unidentified. Oldest objects It is claimed that there are thousands of meteorites across the UK waiting to be found - with only 20 authenticated discoveries so far.
"These are rocks from space and are the oldest objects you can handle. They tell us about the formation of the solar system and the stars that lived and died before the solar system formed," says Richard Greenwood, the Open University's meteorite curator.
"There are two approaches to finding a meteorite; you could either look where other meteorites have been found, as statistically there is a higher chance of finding a meteorite there, or, if you are hoping to find something unique search in a place where no meteorite has previously been found." Looking in relatively featureless landscapes could be lucrative, says Dr Greenwood. If anyone does find a meteorite which is authenticated, it will be given a name - usually based on where it is found - and will be added to an official catalogue of finds held by the Natural History Museum. A sample of any authenticated meteorite has to be handed to researchers, but the remainder will be the property of the person who finds it or the owner of the land where it was discovered. Meteorites have so far been found in four sites in Scotland, two in Wales and Northern Ireland and 12 in England. The website is to be launched on 9 August and a programme, which will feature the hunt, will be shown on BBC2 in late September.
Results
http://www.open2.net/astronomy/isitameteorite/questions.htm
Was It A Meteroite?
The Great British Meteorite Hunt is over - here, Matthew Genge reports back:
It seems that for many years people have been digging up and tripping over mysterious rocks all around the UK. Sometimes the circumstances have been far from mysterious, an unusually shaped piece of metal dug up whilst weeding or a stone on the lawn that we are quite sure wasn't there the day before. Occasionally, however, the circumstances are much more spectacular, the lady woken up by a loud bang in the middle of the night only to find a stone on her third flour balcony, or the farmer who swears he saw a fireball hit the ground late at night whilst assisting in the birth of a calf, and even the man knocked off his bicycle by what must have been a falling meteorite. Over the summer and autumn of 2004 the Great British Meteorite Hunt has dealt with these enquiries and hundreds more.
You might think that spectacular eye-witness accounts are bound to be meteorites, but alas no. A stone that appears on a balcony would appear to have fallen from the sky but when it turns out to be a mineral-lined geode, something very terrestrial indeed, one may just have to accept that it fell from a balcony above, or perhaps was even thrown from below.
Perhaps the hardest events to explain are when people see a fireball land in a field, or behind the house, or in the neighbours garden, but the specimen presented is a perfectly ordinary and innocent terrestrial rock. Having observed a fireball it is quite understandable that they are convinced of the authenticity of their specimen, sometimes to the point that an expert opinion is of little consequence. What probably explains such events is that it is very difficult to judge the distance of a fireball, it can be 70 miles away and look as if it is disappearing over the top of the house or behind a hedge. In fact if it is a fireball then it is quite probably more than 20 miles up in the air. Sometimes there may even be a more mundane explanation. They saw it fall and then picked up the wrong rock!
There has been a tremendous response to the Great British Meteorite Hunt with over 1000 people submitting the details of their specimens to the website. Of these around 100 were examined further as possible meteorites. Only one, however, so far has been confirmed as a meteorite and, embarrassingly enough for the Great British Meteorite Hunt, it fell in Ireland!
So there are still only 20 British meteorites, and this does make us the bottom of the European meteorite league. We do know, however, that there are meteorites out there, may be as many as one per square kilometer, just waiting to be found. But that, unfortunately in our rainy climate, is the real challenge. Perhaps we'll have to wait for the next British meteorite to come crashing through someone's roof, however, at the end of the day does it really matter where they land? With meteorites it's where come from that counts!
