A strange rock discovered by a forest ranger turns out, 54 years later, to be a one-kilo meteorite
According to a study published in May 2024 in the scientific journal The Meteoritical Society, researchers discovered, thanks to recordings dating from the 1970s, the identity of a meteorite found by a forest ranger in the Austrian Alps.
?Are meteor showers every day
As Bernard Melguen, author of Meteorites, Messengers of Space , explained in an interview for France Info , between “ 100,000 to 200,000 tonnes of meteorites ” fall on Earth each year. Therefore, it would rain daily.
However, “ 90% of these meteorites, including shooting stars, are very small fragments, sometimes only a few millimeters long ,” specifies the astronomy specialist. Moreover, the difficulty lies in finding and authenticating them.
Good intuition, thirty-two years later
Proof of this comes from this anecdote dating from 1976 where Josef Pfefferle, a forester in the Austrian Alps, discovered a strange stone the size of a fist while clearing the remains of an avalanche near the Austrian village of Ischgl. Fascinated by her uniqueness, he decides to take her home and put her in a box.
Thirty-two years later, Josef Pfefferle sees a television report about a meteorite discovered in Austria. The forest ranger then thinks back to his strange stone picked up several decades ago in the forest and decides to get to the bottom of it, taking his loot to a university to be analyzed.
Apparently endowed with good intuition, it was thanks to this initiative of Josef Pfefferle that the researchers ended up with a meteorite of about one kilo, which is relatively large . “ It was such a fresh meteorite, and extremely well preserved, ” Maria Gritsevich of the University of Helsinki (Finland) and specialist in planetary sciences, who led the study of the rock fragment, told the New York Times . The meteorite would in fact have landed on Earth shortly before being picked up, according to the analyses.
Find the identity of the meteorite using precise archives
Since 1966, no less than 25 cameras located in southern Germany have been filming the night sky. Scientists therefore studied its images, preserved by the German Aerospace Center in Augsburg, to determine precisely which meteorite it could be.
Considering the location where the Ischgl meteorite was found, Maria Gritsevich and her colleagues assumed that it came from a fireball that entered the Earth's atmosphere on the morning of November 24, 1970.
However, as Peter Brown, a planetary scientist at Western University in Ontario (who was not involved in the research), explains to the New York Times, this famous meteorite could just as easily be even older. Its freshness would come from the alpine environment in which it fell, which could have preserved the rock. “ It could have stayed there for decades, even centuries.”
Source: websites