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(meteorobs) More meteorite from Benny Peiser's web site



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"I could have gotten hit in the head by that thing," said Noe Garza,
48, a steelworker. A few hours later he called his supervisor to report that he couldn't come to work Thursday. "I told him what happened, and he laughed and said, `OK, but don't use that excuse again.'"
 
 
METEORITES MAKE FOR A ROCKY NIGHT
From Steve Koppes <s-koppes@uchicagodot edu>
 
Meteorites make for a rocky night
Chunks break, enter homes in south suburbs
 
By Joseph Sjostrom and Deborah Horan
Tribune staff reporters
Published March 28, 2003
 
A hail of meteorites pelted Illinois for the first time in more than
60 years late Wednesday, poking holes in rooftops and bouncing around
like pinballs inside homes in the Chicago area.
 
One fragment of what had originally been a single, large meteorite
narrowly missed a Park Forest man, crashing into the spot in his
bedroom where he had been standing only minutes before. The meteor
flashed across the sky as it burst apart at about 11:50 p.m.,
according to the National Weather Service, and was seen by people
from Wisconsin to Ohio. Some thought the brilliant light might have
been an attack.
 
"The sky just lit up," said Lauren Ellis of Plainfield, who was
traveling in a car when the meteor shot across the sky. "We were in
shock. We pulled over because we thought it was a bomb."
 
There were no injuries reported in Wednesday's meteorite shower,
which rained at least two dozen chunks of material across the Chicago
area. Police said meteorites crashed through the roofs of two homes
in Matteson and Olympia Fields and hit three intersections. In
Steger, a man found rocks in his driveway. And several people brought
rocks that appeared to be meteorite chunks to the Park Forest police
station.
 
"They might be out there for weeks picking these pieces up," said Dan
Joyce, a scientist at the Cernan Earth and Space Center at Triton
College in River Grove.
 
Scientists said they had not yet mapped out the trajectory of the
meteorite, which exploded into small chunks as it entered the Earth's
atmosphere.
 
A 5-pound fragment fell through the roof of Noe and Paulette Garza's
house in the 400 block of Indiana Avenue in Park Forest and bounced
about the room. It punched a softball-size hole in the roof and then
crashed through the ceiling and shredded a set of venetian blinds. It
ricocheted off a metal window sill, shot about 15 feet across the
bedroom and shattered a floor-to-ceiling mirror before coming to rest
on the floor.
 
Garza had been standing at the windowsill only minutes before the
meteorite hit.
 
"I could have gotten hit in the head by that thing," said Noe Garza,
48, a steelworker.
 
A few hours later he called his supervisor to report that he couldn't
come to work Thursday. "I told him what happened, and he laughed and
said, `OK, but don't use that excuse again.'"
 
Scientists say that every day about 50 tons of material from space
falls on the Earth, most of it only the size of a grain of sand.
 
1938 incidents
 
The last time space debris large enough to be seen and recovered fell
on Illinois was in 1938, when meteorites hit Benld and Bloomington in
separate incidents. In Benld, a 3-pound meteorite crashed through the
roof of a garage and ripped a hole in a car seat. The seat and
meteorite are on display in Chicago's Field Museum.
A few meteorites have been much larger. A meteorite 100 meters in
diameter landed near Flagstaff, Ariz., about 50,000 years ago and
left a crater 1-mile wide. Scientists believe that a huge
meteorite--perhaps 10 kilometers in diameter--caused dinosaurs to
become extinct when it slammed into the Earth some 65 million years
ago.
 
Mark Hammergren of Chicago's Adler Planetarium said the rocks that
landed late Wednesday were probably formed 4 billion years ago when
the sun and planets became differentiated and settled into their
orbits. One mass of space debris failed to coalesce into a planet and
instead formed the asteroid belt, a band of rocks that circles the
sun in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter.
 
Over the eons, asteroids bump into each other, sending chips and
chunks out of orbit. Some of them, Hammergren said, end up on a
collision course with Earth.
 
The Adler's Larry Ciupik guessed that the original meteor may have
weighed a few hundred pounds and was traveling 25,000 m.p.h. when it
hit the Earth's atmosphere. Friction with the atmosphere produced
heat so intense that the air around the meteor glowed, producing the
bright light seen from Wisconsin to Ohio.
The pressure of air on the meteor caused it to break apart, he said,
with some of the little chunks disintegrating into brilliant streams
of light and a few larger ones making it all the way to the Garzas'
bedroom and Brenda and Phillip Jones' basement in Olympia Fields.
 
"Amazing, amazing," said Ciupik, one of four Adler astronomers who
stood in the Joneses' kitchen. They were scrutinizing the
cantaloupe-size rock that had crashed through the Joneses' roof,
penetrated the kitchen floor and hit the basement floor, where it
bounced onto a table and came to rest on a pile of clothes.
 
"It had to be going hundreds of miles an hour to go through all those
layers of roofing and floor," Ciupik said of the black and gray rock.
 
Scientists said they were eager to get their hands on the chunks of
debris to study qualities of the meteorites--including
radioactivity--that could dissipate with time.
 
"We can really learn a lot from meteorites about when the solar
system was forming," said Meenakshi Wadhwa, director of meteorites at
the Field Museum. "They are as old as the sun."
 
Deep questions
 
Several members of the McConathy family, who live next door to the
Garzas Park Forest, were awake when the meteor illuminated the
neighborhood with a bluish light as bright as daylight.
 
Shirley McConathy wondered whether an enemy was attacking from the
sky. Relative Tia McConathy pondered deeper questions.
 
"I thought, `Is this God? Are we going to die?' The light is what
really freaked me out," she said.
 
An Allstate Insurance Co. adjuster visited the Joneses' home Thursday
and told them the damage to their house was covered. He said it was
his first case of meteorite damage in 33 years in the insurance
business.
 
Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
 
============
METEORITES CRASH-LAND IN SUBURBS
 
From Steve Koppes <s-koppes@uchicagodot edu>
 
Chicago Sun-Times, 28 March 2003
 
BY KATE N. GROSSMAN STAFF REPORTER
 
The three giddy meteorite buffs descended on Park Forest early
Thursday morning, eager to poke and prod 10 pieces of rare gray and
black rock that littered the south suburban community Wednesday night
during a meteorite shower.
 
"This is like winning the lottery, just without the money," said an
elated Paul Sipiera, a meteorite collector and educator, as he
examined the stones collected at the Park Forest police station.
 
This was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Meteorite showers
with this many pieces occur in populated areas roughly every five to
20 years, two scientists said, with the last known fall in Illinois
in 1938, according to the Field Museum. Showers can occur daily, but
the stones usually land in an ocean or forest.
 
The Park Forest shower, as it will likely be dubbed by scientists, is
also unique because of the number and size of the stones, with two as
large as 16-inch softballs and weighing about eight pounds.
 
Researchers go gaga over these showers because meteorites--as meteors
are called when they land on Earth--help explain how the solar system
formed 4.5 billion years ago. Meteorites are as old as the solar
system.
 
Most rocks on Earth are 100 million years old or younger.
 
By studying the fragments, scientists can learn about the chemical
composition of the solar system, its age and the chemical processes
that occurred as the solar system cooled from gas to solid planets.
 
"It's a window to our past," said Steve Simon, a University of
Chicago professor who lives in Park Forest and was one of the three
enthusiasts at the police station early Thursday.
 
Wednesday's midnight shower scattered stones across Park Forest, with
about 12 reported to police by day's end. At least two other
communities, Olympia Fields and Matteson, also reported finding one
stone each. Scientists speculate stones could also be found across
the Midwest.
 
The fireball that preceded the shower--when the meteor entered the
atmosphere and began breaking up--was seen across the upper Midwest.
Simon saw the sky light up about 11:50 p.m. Wednesday.
 
Before entering the atmosphere, the meteor was probably the size of a
minivan and traveling up to 10 miles per second, said Meenakshi
Wadhwa of the Field Museum.
 
When the meteorite hit homes, the fire station and streets in Park
Forest, it was falling at about 120 mph.
 
A piece of it slammed through the roof of Noe Garza's house into his
bedroom, smashing a window and windowsill and ricocheting across the
room to a mirror, which it shattered. Noe's 13-year-old son was
sleeping only a few feet from where the meteorite hit.
 
In Olympia Fields, police say, another large stone crashed through
the roof of a home and ended up in the basement. There were no
injuries in either community.
 
Despite the damage they cause, these stones can be quite valuable.
Dealers are wiling to pay between $1 and $10 a gram for them, one
collector said.
 
Copyright 2003, Chicago Sun-Times
 
 
 
Robert Gardner
rendrag@earthlinkdot net
Why Wait? Move to EarthLink.
 

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