{"id":530395,"date":"2010-04-16T13:21:11","date_gmt":"2010-04-16T17:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/badastronomy\/?p=14142"},"modified":"2010-04-16T13:21:11","modified_gmt":"2010-04-16T17:21:11","slug":"wisconsin-meteor-update-meteorite-found-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/530395","title":{"rendered":"Wisconsin meteor update: meteorite found | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apparently, the first meteorite from the fireball over Wisconsin has been found: a pair of brothers discovered a small chunk<\/a> of the bright meteor that burned up over the midwest skies Wednesday night.<\/p>\n

\"wisconsin_meteorite\"<\/a>It certainly looks<\/em> like a meteorite (click to embiggen); the outer blackened fusion crust is from passing through the air, and the interior has the gray, grainy structure in common chondrites<\/a>. The cube is one centimeter in size and is used in photos like this to give scale.<\/p>\n

Pretty cool. There may be thousands of such meteorites lying on the ground in Wisconsin right now; the meteoroid itself was probably a meter or so in size and weighted about a ton. Meteorite hunters are already there searching<\/a>, and I hope that most of the fallen rocks will be sent to researchers for analysis. <\/p>\n

Falls like this are very important scientifically. Having a lot of eyewitnesses means the path and therefore the orbit of the rock can be ascertained, and many times such meteoroids are part of a family of such objects; all on related orbits and probably from the same parent body. When we get samples of the meteorites that means we have samples of an asteroid! <\/p>\n

So if you live in that area and find something suspicious, take photographs of it where it is, then carefully put it in a baggie or box (use gloves if you can so you minimize contamination) and contact a local University. The vast majority of rocks found this way aren’t meteorites (we call ‘em meteorwrongs, haha) but it’s worth making sure.<\/p>\n

Image: Terry Boudreaux, submitted to Rocks From Space<\/a> by Michael Farmer.<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n

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Apparently, the first meteorite from the fireball over Wisconsin has been found: a pair of brothers discovered a small chunk of the bright meteor that burned up over the midwest skies Wednesday night. It certainly looks like a meteorite (click to embiggen); the outer blackened fusion crust is from passing through the air, and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-530395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=530395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/530395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=530395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=530395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=530395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}