The Kalahari contains an interesting crater which — it appears — was formed by a 25cm-diameter unconventional meteorite. Which has survived pretty much intact.
That is, of course, impossible to standard meteorite theory in many ways, as is the meteorite — substantially different to anything else in the known-rogue’s gallery.
Big surprise, not... (-: the approach is “The specific concentrations of platinum group elements in the newfound 10-inch (25 centimeter) meteorite place it in the "LL-ordinary chondrite" group of meteorites. ↵ But other characteristics set it apart from the group, such as having silicate and sulfide minerals rich in iron, but no metallic iron-nickel phase. ↵ "So it is ‘another kind’ of LL-ordinary chondrite that we do not have in our collections," said study co-author Alexander Shukolyukov of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California, San Diego. ↵ A potential implication of this odd meteorite, he said, is that the bombardment of meteorites 145 million years ago was different than those crashing into Earth more recently. ↵ The researchers can’t say for sure why this fragment is preserved” — so, it seems that older meteorite impacting “was different” to what we see today.
But no realistic explanation of the unexpected survival or composition. I count this as heartening, because it seriously opens the scholastic and scientific doors to newer concepts, or (in shorter words) “to learning”.
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