This curious object fell from the sky in northern India

Is it just me, or does the surface seem oddly polished for a meteorite?

Unless that’s completely un-weathered (because fresh fall) clear glassy fusion crust, then that’s the coolest thing ever.

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“Bob” Dobbs was right along! The Pleasure Saucers are here! X-Day is coming!

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Some things should make anyone who knows much about meteorites raise an eyebrow:

  1. Reports that it was “hot to the touch.” Meteorites spend relatively little time being heated by ram pressure as they decelerate in the atmosphere, giving very little time for the heat to penetrate inside (especially when you consider that such objects are as cold as space prior to entry). They then fall through very cold layers of the upper atmosphere, and it’s not unheard of for them to arrive on the ground with a thin coating of frost.

  2. The indentations on this object don’t appear to resemble the “thumbprint-like” regmaglypts that are often found on meteorites. Google “iron meteorite” and see if you can find one that looks even vaguely similar to this object. It’s too silvery (no sign of a fusion crust) and rounded.

  3. This is the second purported witnessed meteorite fall in the province of Rajasthan (roughly the size of Germany) in less than three years. Not impossible, but statistically unlikely.

I’d love to be proven wrong, but this thing is making my baloney meter twitch pretty bad.

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Said everything I intended to say; leaving content. Looks more like a blob of slag from metal processing; perhaps (germanium and cobalt content) leftover from salvaging circuit boards.

Cut off a fragment, polish and etch. Chemical compositions are wrong for an ataxite, so if you don’t get Widmanstatten patterns, it’s not a meteorite.

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very cool!! maybe worth noting that the pitted black look of some meteorites, like the huge one in the american museum of natural history was actually cause by many years of erosion on earth. water and rust on an object with a high iron content. so it would make sense that a metallic object that had, intil recently, been floating in an environment with no oxygen or water or anything might look like new clean metal. :slight_smile:

Fireworks dragon feces.

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Or so we want you to believe.

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I think it’s a metal found in the UK. Like Aluminium, but more valuable.

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“private lab located at the jeweller’s shop in Sanchore”

I’m just wondering how a jeweler’s shop in a town of about 250K in Rajasthan would have equipment to do such a seemingly-precise analysis. Are XRF instruments so common in India or was some other method used?

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That’s because it’s 0.02% balonium.

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I thought about that. But I’ve seen photos of freshly-fallen iron meteorites, and none of them look that clean.

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aka AHNIGHITO: 34 tons. Found in West Greenland, Greenland

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Aluminium is found in most of Europe. In America it’s called iAluminum (same material but proprietary, twice as expensive, doesn’t work and requires DRM).

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But… how much tar did it contain? :slight_smile:

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Owls are capricious animals :sweat_smile:

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This. See above photos of some nickel iron meteorite machining stock I have.

That meteorite looks waaay too clean for one just fallen…they usually break up into many pieces, and have some kind of fusion crust on them.

Since it’s obviously metallic- that Widmanstatten pattern is a surefire way of proving its genuine. It cannot be faked in any way- its only possible to achieve that pattern from a rate of cooling 1 degree Celsius per million years or so in vaccum of space.

As for why I have meteorites I’ve machined, I make weird stuff.

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image

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