* Astronomy

Blobrana · L

RE: Jæren Impact

Blobrana · L

Meteoritt på Orre
Det var som rene julaften for oss da vi hørte at Bjørn Herigstad fant en 2 kilos meteoritt utenfor huset sitt på Orre i går. Både vår formann Terje Holte og geolog Fridtjof Riis var på befaring til Orre. Steinen ser ut til å være en steinmeteoritt, og den må analyseres før man kan slå dette fast med 100% sikkerhet. Det var både TV, avis og radio tilstede, og TV-Vest skulle sende et opptak kl. 17:30 i dag. Det er Terje Holte som har tatt alle bildene.

IMAGE (94kb, 800 x 532)
IMAGE (91kb, 800 x 532)
IMAGE (97kb, 800 x 532)

Credit Stavanger Astronomy Society

Blobrana · L

Steinen veier to kilo, og har brennmerker. Eksperter har nå konkludert med at det er en meteoritt.
Credit Karl Emil Sødergren (Jærbladet)

See more

-- Edited by Blobrana at 18:00, 2006-07-10

Blobrana · L

A meteorite weighing around two kilos landed right in the yard outside Bjørn Herigstad's home in coastal Jæren, western Norway, over the weekend. It's the second meteorite-landing in Norway in a month, and experts are calling the incident sensational.

Bjørn Herigstad says he found the meteorite just outside his house at Orre, in the Jæren district just south of Stavanger in Rogaland County. When he went outside Sunday morning, he found a crater on his property, about 25 centimetres deep.

"I couldn't understand why there was such a hole and just started filling it in" Bjørn Herigstad.

But then he found an unusual stone a few meters from the crater.

"It's the oddest stone I've ever seen"

Herigstad said he took it into his kitchen and washed it off, then weighed it.

"You could see that it had melted and that it's burned on one side. What if it had hit our house? It would have gone right through the roof. I wonder whether our insurance would have covered it" - Bjørn Herigstad.

Per Amund Amundsen of the Stavanger Astronomy Society says that meteorites land on Norway as often as every month, but most are never found.

"This is a bit of a sensation. It's not unusual that a meteorite of this size would have created such a hole. This is incredibly exciting" - Per Amund Amundsen, who's also a professor at the University in Stavanger.

Astronomers were also excited last month when residents of northern Norway saw a meteorite streak through the light summer sky before it hit the ground east of Tromso.
Knut Jørgen Ødegaard, an astronomer at the University of Oslo, agreed that the meteor at Jæren over the weekend "is very special. What's sensational is that it fell so close to a house. That's extremely unusual."

Herigstad, meanwhile, isn't sure what he'll do with the meteorite, which could be a valuable sales object. A quick check on the Internet revealed prices as high as NOK 700,000.

"We had just been wondering whether a cabin we're building is getting too expense, and then this falls out of the sky".

Source