This is another favourite from 5 years ago...................................
In a farmers field in the East Yorkshire Wolds of
the UK there is a small monument to mark the spot where a meteorite fell in
1795. It just missed an agricultural worker whilst toiling amongst the root
crop but the rare fragment was seized by the landowner and shamelessly hawked around the country
for material gain for many years thereafter.
There have been , it is thought, only 24 official
meteorite falls in the British Isles and so finding a meteorite quickly means
it can be preserved before it gets weathered by the Earth. Who knows how many
fragments just go unnoticed after surviving the fiery extreme temperatures of
the upper atmosphere.
The biggest meteorite to hit the UK landed in a
small village in Leicestershire one Christmas Eve. Fifty years on, the search
for its highly valuable fragments is far from over.
The last thing Percy England expected on
Christmas Eve was for a 4,000,000,000-year-old meteorite to put a hole through
his brand new Vauxhall Viva.
There had been no warnings of the shower of
rocks. The meteor plummeted through the Earth's atmosphere on a cold December
afternoon in 1965. It could have hit Leicester but instead broke up over the
nearby village of Barwell just after sunset.
The pieces found scattered across houses and
streets on Christmas Day sparked a frenzied meteorite hunt. The fragments are
still being studied by the Natural History Museum. They are also highly sought
after by collectors. In 2009, a 2lb (0.9kg) piece made £8,000 at auction.
People are being encouraged to bring any
meteorite pieces that they might have squirreled away to the anniversary event
this year. "It would be brilliant if they could," says Dan Kendall,
curator of the National Space Centre. But their stories of what happened are
just as valuable, he adds.
Most recollections of the meteorite strike start
- appropriately enough for Christmas Eve - with a bright light in the sky. It
was followed by a sonic boom.
When a meteor travels faster than the speed of
sound it creates a shock wave, explains planetary scientist Leigh Fletcher from
the University of Leicester. In 2013, the shock wave from the Chelyabinsk
meteor in Russia was picked up by scientists more than 9,320 miles (15,000 km)
away in Antarctica.
In Barwell, the booming sound was heard by
Fletcher's mother-in-law. She was taking a dog for a walk in a cow field when
she heard a tremendous crash. A group of carol singers set out across the
village soon after and felt something crunching under their feet as they went.
At one point, 26-year-old Rosemary Leader picked
up a piece of the rubble to examine it under the light of the street lamp before
throwing it away. "I was out carol singing, I didn't want to carry a lump
of rock around," she says.
A few people didn't notice anything amiss until
Christmas Day. The first thing Percy spotted was the hole through the bonnet of
his new car. Other people had woken up to find similar holes in the tarmac,
windows and roof slates.
Within a few hours the news had filtered out that
a meteorite had crashed over the village.
"My dad immediately got on to the
insurance," says his son Trevor. "They came back saying it was an act
of God. So the next thing he did was to write a letter to the insurance company
which began 'Dear Mr God'."
Percy was never paid. But others managed to cash
in during the next month. The news took a few days to break properly. As soon
as it did the town was flooded by meteorite hunters.
Museums offered money for fragments of the space
rock. "There was a bit of a gold rush, really, in Barwell," says
Kendall. Even the astronomer Patrick Moore joined the hunt.
About 97lbs (44kg) of meteorite was recovered.
"When they put it back together, it was about the size of a Christmas
turkey," says Kendall. It's rare to recover so much of a meteorite in a
place like the UK.
The mud and vegetation makes them hard to spot,
explains Natasha Almeida, assistant meteorite curator at the Natural History
Museum.
It's even rarer to see a meteor fall and then
actually find it afterwards.
"You've basically almost got a time
capsule," adds Kendall. The Barwell meteorite, he explains, is older than
the Earth itself.
But the Barwell meteorite is special for another
reason. A pebble was found inside one of its fragments. "It has
characteristics of different types of meteorites," says Almeida, who is
studying some of the Barwell pieces.
"There could have been another body that
formed, another asteroid, that smashed into pieces and after a bit of that was
incorporated into the asteroid that the Barwell came from."
The pieces that were recovered might slowly be
revealing their secrets. But there are thought to be plenty more still missing.
"There are an awful lot of people with their
little bits of meteorite tucked away somewhere," says Margaret Pickering.
Her husband was lucky in the hunt all those years ago. "We do have a
little bit of meteorite," she adds.
Margaret says she will bring it to a celebration
of the crash landing . The village has changed a lot since the 1960s. Many of
the fields littered with meteorite no longer exist. But "there are
probably lots of pieces still there waiting," she adds.
The largest Barwell piece will be returning to
where it fell half a century ago this December. It's value has not been
disclosed but then again some things are just, by their very story, priceless.
People are being encouraged to bring any meteorite pieces that they might have kept
to the anniversary event.
Dr Fletcher suggests that every story and piece
of the meteorite connects Barwell to something much bigger.
He said: "It's the debris from the birth of
our solar system. It's no wonder people keep a piece of it tucked away in a
box."
Source document in BBC News Magazine
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