Posted by KeighleyAstro on Dec 24, 2024 in Main |

The December meeting of Keighley Astronomical Society was held on Thursday 12th. As is now the custom at this time of year a large selection of freshly made sandwiches, mice pies and Christmas cake were on offer to temp the society members who attended to meeting. In return donations to be directed to the ‘Sue Ryder charity’ were requested. Well as usual society members showed their generosity by giving the sum of £70 in total, which society secretary Dominic Curran was absolutely delighted with.

Continuing with the Christmas team the guest speaker Mr Martin Lunn MBE FRAS took the members present at the meeting on a hunt for a Christmas meteorite.

Mr Lunn gained a degree in astrophysics from the Open University before working for the Civil Service. In 1989 he joined the Yorkshire Museum as Curator of Astronomy. Mr Lunn was awarded a MBE for services to astronomy in the 1998 New Year Honours. In 2013 he presented a broadcast for BBC Stargazing Live from the Yorkshire Museum, and he has served on the council of the Society for the History of Astronomy.

Mr Lunn commenced the hunt by going back in time to Christmas Eve 1965, and the goings on in a small Leicestershire village, when a meteorite the size of a Christmas turkey broke up over Barwell. It remains the largest meteorite fall observed in Britain.
All these years later the search for its highly valuable fragments is far from over.

Before taking us to Barwell Mr Lunn explained what a meteorite is.

He explained that a meteorite is a rock that falls to Earth from space. Meteorites are different from Earth rocks because they are usually much older and provide samples from other planets, asteroids, and comets in our solar system.

Meteorites are created when a meteoroid, (a chunk of rock or metal from space), survives its passage through Earth’s atmosphere. So a meteoroid orbits the sun like a planet, asteroid, or comet.
A meteor is when a meteoroid enters Earth’s atmosphere, it heats up and radiates energy, creating a bright streak of light called a meteor or shooting star, and if the meteoroid survives its fall, it reaches Earth’s surface and becomes a meteorite.

Throughout Earth’s history, there have been many instances of near-Earth objects (NEOs) impacting our planet, either reaching the surface or exploding above ground from the intense energy released as the object passed through the atmosphere. Asteroid impacts are natural processes that shape the surface of our planet, like volcanoes. The vast majority of these impacts were from very small objects, but there have been some remarkable exceptions.

In 2013, an asteroid about 20 meters in diameter entered Earth’s atmosphere above the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. It exploded while it was still in the air, releasing the same amount of energy as 500 kilotons of TNT.
In 1908 an approximately 30-meter-diameter asteroid or comet entered the atmosphere and exploded above ground in Tunguska, Russia. The explosion knocked down approximately 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 square kilometres (830 square miles).

65 million years ago an asteroid roughly 10 to 15 kilometers (6 to 9 miles) in diameter hit Earth in what is now Mexico. The impact killed 70% of all species on Earth, including the dinosaurs.

An impact of that size would have had devastating effects, and the geological record gives us some indication of what happened. The asteroid hit in water, creating mega-tsunamis reaching from southeastern Mexico all the way to Texas and Florida and up a shallow interior ocean that covered what is now the Great Plains. The blast would have thrown chunks of the asteroid and Earth so far that they would have briefly left the atmosphere before falling back to the ground.

Mr Lunn pointed out that there are many references to meteorites in the Bible, including:-

Joshua 10:11
Describes the Israelites defeating five kings and the Lord casting “great stones from heaven” upon the defeated armies. Some interpret this as a shower of meteorites.

Genesis 19:24–25
Some suggest that a meteorite or asteroid impact may have caused the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Acts 9:3–4
Describes Saul seeing a bright light in the sky while travelling to Damascus, which blinded him and led to him hearing the voice of Jesus. Some astronomers believe the light was an exploding meteor.

Revelation 6:13
The only passage in the Bible that explicitly states that stars will fall upon the earth
.
Matthew 24:29
Describes a complete blackout of the sun, moon, and stars, followed by the second coming.

Ezekiel 38:22
Another biblical reference to meteorites.

Book of Jude
Verse 13 refers to “wandering stars” or comets, which are used to describe false teachers.

Returning to the village of Barwell Mr Lunn stated that the last thing Percy England expected on Christmas Eve was for a 4.5bn-year-old meteorite to put a hole through his brand new Vauxhall Viva.

There had been no warnings of impending doom. The meteor plummeted through the Earth’s atmosphere on a cold December afternoon in 1965. It could have hit Leicester but instead broke up over the nearby village of Barwell just after sunset.

The pieces found scattered across houses and streets on Christmas Day sparked a frenzied meteorite hunt. The fragments are still being studied by the Natural History Museum. They are also highly sought after by collectors. In 2009, a 2lb (0.9kg) piece made £8,000 at auction.

Most recollections of the meteorite strike start – appropriately enough for Christmas Eve – with a bright light in the sky. It was followed by a sonic boom.
When a meteor travels faster than the speed of sound it creates a shock wave, explained Mr Lunn. In 2013, the shock wave from the Chelyabinsk meteor in Russia was picked up by scientists more than 9,320 miles (15,000 km) away in Antarctica.

In Barwell, the booming sound was heard by Fletcher’s mother-in-law. She was taking a dog for a walk in a cow field when she heard a tremendous crash. A group of carol singers set out across the village soon after and felt something crunching under their feet as they went.

At one point, 26-year-old Rosemary Leader picked up a piece of the rubble to examine it under the light of the street lamp before throwing it away. “I was out carol singing, I didn’t want to carry a lump of rock around,” she says.
A few people didn’t notice anything amiss until Christmas Day. The first thing Percy spotted was the hole through the bonnet of his new car. Other people had woken up to find similar holes in the tarmac, windows and roof slates.
Within a few hours the news had filtered out that a meteorite had crashed over the village.

“My dad immediately got on to the insurance,” says his son Trevor. “They came back saying it was an act of God. So the next thing he did was to write a letter to the insurance company which began ‘Dear Mr God’.”
Percy was never paid. But others managed to cash in during the next month. The news took a few days to break properly. As soon as it did the town was flooded by meteorite hunters.

Museums offered money for fragments of the space rock.
“There was a bit of a gold rush, really, in Barwell,” says Kendall. Even the astronomer Patrick Moore joined the hunt.

About 97lbs (44kg) of meteorite was recovered. “When they put it back together, it was about the size of a Christmas turkey,” says Kendall. It’s rare to recover so much of a meteorite in a place like the UK.

The mud and vegetation makes them hard to spot, explained Mr Lunn.

It’s even rarer to see a meteor fall and then actually find it afterwards.
“There have been only 24 official falls in the British Isles,” said Mr Lunn. Finding a meteorite quickly means it can be preserved before it gets weathered by the Earth.
“You’ve basically almost got a time capsule,” added Mr Lunn. The Barwell meteorite, he explaind, is older than the Earth itself.

But the Barwell meteorite is special for another reason. A pebble was found inside one of its fragments. “It has characteristics of different types of meteorites,” said Mr Lunn.

“There could have been another body that formed, another asteroid, that smashed into pieces and after a bit of that was incorporated into the asteroid that the Barwell came from.”

The pieces that were recovered might slowly be revealing their secrets. But there are thought to be plenty more still missing.

“There are an awful lot of people with their little bits of meteorite tucked away somewhere,” said Mrs Margaret Pickering. Her husband was lucky in the hunt all those years ago. “We do have a little bit of meteorite.”

The village has changed a lot since the 1960s. Many of the fields littered with meteorite no longer exist. But “there are probably lots of pieces still there waiting,” said Mr Lunn.

Every story and piece of the meteorite connects Barwell to something much bigger, explained Mr Lunn. “It’s the debris from the birth of our solar system,” he says. “It’s no wonder people keep a piece of it tucked away in a box.”

Mr Lunn concluded by saying if you want to see some of the larger pieces of the Barwell Meteorite you need to get yourself down to the Leicestershire Museum.