Meteorites

"The Henbury meteorites, yes. We’ve got some of those. There are a number of stories and legends in Aboriginal cultures that describe things falling from heaven and landing on Earth. Anthropologists, scientists and historians have been able to work out that, yes, this tribe was in that area and there is an impact crater 4,000 years old and there is archaeological evidence that this tribe was in that area then so it’s very likely that people did see this event happen. Oh God. They’re all my favourites! It depends on the day of the week. Well, one of my favourite meteorites is the Wold Cottage meteorite which is sitting outside my office. It’s a very important meteorite that fell in Yorkshire in 1795. There are not very many British meteorites and that’s one of them. Meteorite studies only started getting going in the late 1700s early 1800s and prior to that they’d been considered not worthy of study by the scientific intelligentsia. The reason for that is socio-cultural, because meteorite falls would be witnessed by people who were working outdoors, like peasants and farmers. So the landowners just dismissed them. But then there were a number of falls which were witnessed by people who would be listened to. There was a fall in 1794, a shower of stones over Siena, and many British aristocrats were there doing the Grand Tour and they witnessed the shower and brought some of the stones back to the UK. We have some in the collection here. So these were obviously people who you could trust. And then in 1795 this stone fell in Yorkshire and was witnessed by a farmhand who was believed by his landowner, who brought the specimen down to London. Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, had a look at it and thought yes, we should be studying this. And so this group of stones were analysed by a British chemist who recognised that the stones had metals in them, which was unusual for a terrestrial rock and, importantly, the metal contained nickel. The decision was that they are all similar and they are not from Earth. That was really what got it going, and Wold Cottage was pivotal to those studies. It looks like a big lump of rock about the size of a football. On one side it’s very dark greyish black – that’s the fusion crust where it’s burnt as it’s come through the atmosphere – and on the other side is a sawn surface."