Meteorite
esiegel | February 15, 2013“Don't wake me for the end of the world unless it has very good special effects.” -Roger Zelazny
It's always the ones you least expect that get you the worst, it seems. I went to bed last night excited that Asteroid 2012 DA14, a 200,000 ton asteroid, was going to pass within just 28,000 km (or 17,000 miles) of Earth's surface, which would make it the closest pass of an asteroid that large that we've ever observed.
Image credit: NASA / JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office.
I thought that would be the best way to celebrate today, which would be Galileo's 449th birthday. After all, it was…
gregladen | February 15, 2013UPDATE: Somebody found a hole in some ice.
This is a meteor streaking across the sky in the vicinity of the Urals:
Numerous additional films of that event and some analysis are on Phil Plait's blog, here.
Here's a FAKE video purported to be a crater formed by a fragment of that meteor BUT IT ISN'T:
From Phil Plait's blog: "Note also lots of hoaxes are turning up, like a video of a flaming crater that's actually a flaming pit in Turkmenistan that's been burning for decades (called "The Door to Hell"). Be cautious and be skeptica"
... apparently the shock wave of the meteor passing over…
gregladen | January 17, 2013I know, right?
Anthony Watts, of the science-denialist Whats Up with That blog, has got his shorts in a knot because of a post I wrote indicating that he is a boob. He is upset because in a screen shot of him talking about a totally absurd pseudo-scientific claim that should have been rejected out of hand, I failed to include enough of the post to show that he was skeptical about the claim.
Let me be very very clear: This is not a claim to be skeptical about. This is a Teapot orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars claim. A person who has reported debunked claims about alien life again…
cevans | August 28, 2011The Book of Exogenesis: In the beginning was the word, and the word was a meteorite...
Earlier this month, a report, based on NASA studies of meteorites found on Earth, suggested that some building blocks of DNA may have been formed in space.
As it turns out, DNA components have been found on meteorites before, but it's never been entirely clear if the space rocks came to Earth bearing these molecules, or if they were contaminated upon arrival. Furthermore, this recent study of meteorites was the first to discover trace amounts of three molecules -- purine, 2,6-diaminopurine, and 6,8-…
sciencepunk | April 8, 2010Last year Neatorama's Alex Zavatone happened to find himself near Angola on the African continent. While driving through Grootfontein, Namibia, he spotted a road sign that simply said "Meteorite." Later he decided to make a 170 mile pilgrimage through beautiful and wild landscapes to Hoba to see what it was all about.
You'll have to go to the Neatorama website to see the money shot - but it's worth it! I've never seen such a well-presented interplanetary visitor. Read Alex's full tale here.
grrlscientist | November 10, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, Tunguska event, Siberian explosion, Podkamennaya Tunguska River, Lake Cheko, planet earth, astronomy
Flattened trees cover vast areas of Northeastern Siberia
after the mysterious Tunguska explosion in June, 1908.
Image: TASS/Sovfoto (public domain?) [larger view].
As a kid, I was fascinated by the mysterious explosion that occurred over Siberia. Basically, in the morning of 30 June 1908, a few native peoples in Siberia reported seeing a blue light in the sky that was as bright as the sun and hearing a series of loud explosions, accompanied by fierce winds and…
laelaps | November 1, 2007
A close-up B&W shot of the Willamette Meteorite. The holes the riddle one face of the meteorite were not caused by "cosmic collisions" but by the bolide rusting away in the ground prior to its removal from the Oregon soil (it consists of 91% iron).
Virginia Hughes is an editorial assistant here at ScienceBlogs who was especially helpful in moving Laelaps over to it's new home, and now she's brought her excellent writing to The Gist on Smithsonian.com. The first story? A 30-pound hunk of the Willamette Meteorite appraised at $1.3 million was withdrawn from auction after it failed to…