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(meteorobs) An Irish Meteorite?



Hi all,

Below is an article from the Feb 11-17 issue of the Irish Echo, an Irish
American newspaper my father gets. Thanks to him for cutting it out for me.
The article is in its entirety and I didn't make any comments or try to
clarify anything. 


Kevin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fermanagh's suspicious boom had cosmic origins

By Andrew Bushe

	DUBLINA meter-wide crater blown in a County Ferrnanagh field last month,
within miles of the border with the Republic, was not the result of a bomb, as
was first suspected, but was almost certainly caused by a meteorite, according
to the director of the Armagh Planetarium.

	On Dec. 13, a sound not unlike an explosion rocked buildings and smashed
windows in homes near Belleek, Co. Berrnanagh, and resulted in an
investigation by the British army and the RUC.

	It wasn't until a farmer discovered a small crater in his field near
Enniskillen-Bundoran Road on Jan. 6 that suspicions were aroused that a cosmic
close encounter might have been involved.

	Dr. Tom Mason, the planetarium's director, said when he and his staff were
called in by police they had an "aura of healthy skepticism." As soon as they
drained the water out of the hole, they realized it might be a meteorite.

	A week-long detailed investigation of the field failed to find proof, but
samples were taken and a 1.5 millimeter glass fragment was later found on a
piece of a steel pan that, along with a milk churn, was found near the crater.

	'It was a complete fluke I found it," Mason said of the fragment. 'It is like
an insect larvae or a seed, but, bingo, it was a little glassy sphere. As far
as I was concerned, that little bit of evidence was the clincher.

	'"Under the microscope it is quite characteristic of a cosrnic particle and
one of my astronomer colleagues in the Arrnagh Observatory, lDr. Bill Napier,
who is an expert on meteorites, concurs with that opinion."

	Mason said he thinks the meteonte may have weighed up to a ton and was a
particle from the asteroid Phaethon, a burned-out comet.

	The fragment could be about 4.5 billion years old, whereas the bedrock in the
Belleek area is only 350 million years old.

	"It is a very exciting scientific find," Mason said. "We have checked the
international literature and there are no samples of this particular meteor
shower hitting the earth. If we can find more bits and pieces, our colleagues
all over the world will be shouting for them for analysis.

	"I have informed colleagues in Australia and in the Smithsonian in Washington
and have sent little samples of the milk churn over to London to see if they
can be analyzed too.

	'We now think that we had a fairly high-entry object coming in from space at
a high angle. The time of year it impacted is the best time to be hit by the
Genninid meteor swarm, the tail of rubbish that follows around Phaethon."

	Mason said that when the meteonte entered the earth's atmosphere it would
have been much bigger but had burned up and lost a lot of its mass before
impact.

	'what actually hit the ground was anything from 20 centimeters to a meter
across," Mason said 'Y would go probably for the lower of those two figures.
It exploded and we think all the tiny wee bits are scattered all over the
field."