Stones from the sky

Usage examples of meteorites.

They were waiting for the secondary meteorites thrown up by the first meteor to begin to fall.

Some of them release carbon that is embedded into meteorites, which strike planets and embed the chips there.

However, there is one phenomenon connected with the trains of meteorites which has never been satisfactorily explained: they often persist for long periods of time, drifting and turning with the wind, but not ceasing to glow with a phosphorescent luminosity.

Nickel is commonly found in iron meteorites, so that it might be said that that redoubtable alloy nickel-steel is of cosmical invention.

The iron meteorites, besides metallic iron and nickel, of which they are almost entirely composed, contain hydrogen, helium, and carbonic oxide, and about the only imaginable way in which these gases could have become absorbed in the iron would be through the immersion of the latter while in a molten or vaporized state in a hot and dense atmosphere composed of them, a condition which we know to exist only in the envelopes of the sun and the stars.

The fact that they are found embedded in these iron meteorites is another argument in favor of the hypothesis of the solar or stellar origin of the latter.

In the absence of an atmosphere not only would more meteorites reach the ground, but their striking force would be incomparably greater, since, as we have seen, the larger part of their original velocity is destroyed by the resistance of the air.

In that case it would have been less retarded by the resistance of the atmosphere than are meteorites which enter the air at a lower angle and shoot ahead hundreds of miles until friction has nearly destroyed their original motion when they drop upon the earth.

Professor Pickering conjectures that this supposed flock of great meteorites may have formed the nucleus of a comet which struck the earth, and he finds confirmation of the idea in the fact that out of the ten largest meteorites known, no less than seven were found within nine hundred miles of Coon Butte.

This would apply especially to the stony meteorites, for it is hardly to be supposed that the moon, at least in its superficial parts, contains much iron.