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Feb 19, 2009
Meteorite hunters from the University of North Texas (UNT) have scooped up what may be two pieces of the object that lit up the skies over Austin on Sunday. Ronald DiIulio, director of UNT's planetarium and astronomy lab, and Preston Starr, the university's observatory manager, told news outlets that they found two pecan-size fragments yesterday near the town of West, about 20 miles north of Waco.
"The pieces that we found have beautiful ablation crust," DiIulio told the Associated Press, referring to the fusion crust formed by the extreme temperatures of atmospheric entry. "And it's black like charcoal. Underneath this crust the color of the rock is concrete like gray." (A phone call to DiIulio's office was not immediately returned.)
Dec 30, 2008
Did a big wave hit the Big Apple way back when? Scientists say a tsunami struck the New York City area 2,300 years ago, possibly as a result of a meteorite crashing into the Atlantic Ocean.
“It would have been a bad day to end all bad days,” research scientist Dallas Abbott of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory tells today's New York Times.
While no one has found a large crater that would indicate that a meteorite struck, Abbott discovered miniscule diamonds and tiny carbon spheres in Hudson River sediment that may be signs that a rock 330 feet (100 meters) across hit the New York City area. Abbott and colleagues at Harvard University reported their finding earlier this month at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
Nov 24, 2008 | 31
Hundreds of people witnessed a meteor lighting up the evening sky over Edmonton, Alberta, last week, and the spectacular fireball was even caught on tape by unsuspecting videographers. Around 5:30 P.M. MST Thursday, a brilliant streak of light shot across the western Canadian sky, setting meteorite hunters on a chase to find any surviving fragments of the object.
"We're trying to take all the reports and put them together in a meaningful conclusion as to where it might have fallen," Frank Florian, of the TELUS World of Science in Edmonton, told the Edmonton Sun.
Added Alan Hildebrand, professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Calgary and leader of the Prairie Meteorite Search project: "It may have been the largest [meteor], or one of the largest that would have occurred over Canada this year." Hildebrand told the Edmonton Journal that the object probably broke into pieces and landed east of Edmonton, near the Alberta-Saskatchewan border.
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