Found a meteorite?

[FullTimeDad]

I was working in my yard and heard something "hit" behind me on the ground I had just cleared. I found a small brownish rock and when I picked it up, it was incredibly hot. It is about 1 1/2 inches long and one end looks like it broke off and there is a very small hollow space inside. It is very smooth but has pock marks on it's surface. Could this possibly be a small meteorite? It looks a lot like some photos I found on the "net". If it had been two feet closer it would have hit me!
Thanks!
Dad

 

[MeteorWayne]

Sorry, but very unlikely. Meteorites are not hot when they hit the ground. Also, they would not be holoow. It's more likely it is part of a machine that broke and was launched toward you.

Meteor Wayne

 

[adrenalynn]

You would need to post good photos of the features.

"Hot" would certainly suggest that it's not. "A small hollow" isn't a good enough descriptor. No, they wouldn't be hollow, but he could be describing orienting with a lip, so I can't really say there.

Post photos of all the pertinent features.

Welcome to SDC!

 

[bushwhacker]

I'm sure theres a reason, but knowing anything comeing in from space gets incredibly heated by friction in the atmoshere why couldn't a meterorite still be hot if you found it as soon as it hit?

 

[MeteorWayne]

Because a small object would have been falling for many minutes through the atmosphere (straight down, purely from gravity) long after it lost it's "heating" speed. In addition, any meteoroid that travels through the atmosphere, if it gets hot enough, loses all the hot stuff as it is torn away by the friction. Remember, the object is in space before it hits the air, so is many degrees ( probably hundreds) below zero before it hits the air. So you have a very cold object, that heats up for maybe 5 seconds (at best for a very slow approach velocity) and then falls for many minutes through very cold air.

This is a very common urban myth. It's meteoritics 101.

Meteor Wayne

 

[adrenalynn]

If Meteor Wayne will forgive me for treading into his territory ( ):

The "Dark Flight" of a meteor. Dark flight generally starts at the upper-most reaches of the tropopause or even up into the stratosphere. It's -45 to -150 C up there. That's the point where ablation stops and the dark flight starts.

That's why people see a bright fireball and think "oh my gosh, it must be in my back yard almost!" when it really ends-up in Australia or the Atlantic freakin' ocean. One of the grand myths is that they come flaming into the ground. They don't. You just lose track of them once they've entered dark flight. Anything big enough to burn all the way to the ground, well, I promise you'll never know it.

Any meteor that survives to dark flight is coming in, and likely soft enough it will become a meteorite.

 

[bushwhacker]

thanks wayne and lynn.. i guess anything hot to the touch would have blown up anything around it anyway

 

[FullTimeDad]

thanks! It's probably something kicked up by the nearby construction. Oh well.

 

[adrenalynn]

Don't sweat it! If you want to find a meteorite, you gotta go through a whole lotta meteorongs

It's a rite, errr, right of passage.

 

[MeteorWayne]

Don't sweat it! If you want to find a meteorite, you gotta go through a whole lotta meteorongs

Ahem... the correct spelling is meteorwrongs :lol: :lol: :lol:

http://meteorites.wustl.edu/meteorwrong ... wrongs.htm

 

[adrenalynn]

Oops! shot myself in the foot getting cute with markup after the fact. Rite you are.