Meteorite

[AndyC]

I felt like owning something that came from off this world, so I ordered this offa eBay:





Nickel-iron with olivine crystals, categorized as a "pallasite". This slice comes from a fragment of the "Sericho" meteorite that landed in Kenya:

https://meteorites.asu.edu/meteorites/sericho

[358429]

Really new and really old. How does it feel to hold?

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[AndyC]

Heavy and cold.

[358429]

Is it big or small?

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[AndyC]

It's only about 3" x 2-1/4" and around 1/8" thick.

[358429]

That's really cool it really is a slice of a meteorite!

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[358429]

If I had one of those I'd be doing weird stuff like checking its electrical resistance with the fluke multimeter and seeing if it changes when I touch it with a magnet.

Then I'd probably get the grand idea to see how it would look after a couple of hours with a buffing wheel

I hope you're not offended, the only meteorites I have ever seen or handled outside of a museum were very small nickel iron cubes, and little stony pebbles.



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[AndyC]

Heck not at all - I've never had one before so I totally get it Many people etch them with acids to show the "Widmanstatten pattern", which is really neat.

They're all over eBay - go have a look and see what you could afford. I got this one from a Chinese seller for probably 1/3rd of what they cost locally, but it took almost 3 weeks to get here.

[DougGuy]

Put a light behind it!

[dannyd]

Hope it’s not like Joe Dirt’s meteor

[Triggerfinger]

Looks out of this world...

[pworley1]

Very nice.

[imashooter2]

Hope it’s not like Joe Dirt’s meteor

I didn’t see any peanuts.

[8mmFan]

Do you suppose it’s actually real?

[AndyC]

Yep - be kinda silly and really tough to go to all this trouble for the little money I paid. Besides, these things aren't uncommon and if I really wanted I could etch it and look for the patterns in the metal, which don't occur on earth:

The formation of Ni-poor kamacite proceeds by diffusion of Ni in the solid alloy at temperatures between 700 and 450 °C, and can only take place during very slow cooling, about 100 to 10,000 °C/Myr, with total cooling times of 10 Myr or less. This explains why this structure cannot be reproduced in the laboratory..... nickel-iron crystals grow to lengths of some centimeters only when the solid metal cools down at an exceptionally slow rate (over several million years)

- Myr = million years

Put a light behind it!

Heck yeah - I'm looking for a li'l LED with battery

[358429]

Is the rate of cooling so slow because the metal is very close to absolute zero when in the deep space?

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[AndyC]

I have no unearthly (*cough*) idea.

[DougGuy]

Is the rate of cooling so slow because the metal is very close to absolute zero when in the deep space?

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I don't think it was very cold at all wherever/whenever that thing was made. The formation of the quartz or whatever it is that isn't iron seems suspended with some degree of consistency, so that would lead me to believe that gravity was much less than it is on Earth, or the iron would be at one end and the quartz at the other. It would also appear to have formed as a large structure, that might have been violently destroyed sending fragments of it hurtling through space in all directions. It probably wouldn't have been a star, stars are made of gases that burn, any iron in a star would have been vaporized, so maybe it was a moon that crashed into a planet or a large asteroid hit it and made small meteorites who knows.. Or, maybe it got sucked into a black hole then imploded or exploded..

[Shawlerbrook]

Reminds me of the Jim Bowie movie with Alan Ladd where his knife was made from a meteorite.

[358429]

All that surrounds us, stars moon and planets, sometimes have fantastic physical properties. In theory I suppose, not proven by a core sample yetStars can have liquid and solid metal cores, from elements we consider gasses like hydrogen and helium, forced into liquid or solid state due to tremendous pressure, strange things happening due to the incredible heat, pressure and electrical potential.

I have wondered since I was a boy that if it was possible to recover some sufficient amount of iron, chromium, nickel, some other elements as well, from a stars center, then would the physical properties of things made from this star metal be much stronger (knives, mechanical parts, guns, hulls for ships and spacecraft)?

Then things get wierder with neutron stars. All that is can be soo cool

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