Where do meteorites come from in space? The oligarchs have their eyes on Ukrainian meteorites
A considerable number of meteorites are found on Earth every year. Have you ever thought about the true number of meteorites that are on the globe? According to scientific centers, only 12-15 pieces of meteorites per year fall into the hands of people, no more. Meanwhile, about 1000 fragments reach the Earth, however, the oceans, as well as forests and other uninhabited territories, take the lion's share of this number.
Origin of meteorites
Regarding the origin of these celestial bodies, I must say that the point of view, according to which meteorites are just the remains of planets that once existed, seems to scientists to be the most correct. There is a fairly large group of small planets, their size in diameter, as a rule, does not exceed one kilometer, it is due to their collisions that meteorite bodies are formed. The process of movement and collision is continuous and the resulting fragments, colliding, form smaller and smaller meteorite fragments, and their number in interplanetary space is replenished.
Where do meteorite names come from?
All meteorites that have fallen on our planet can be divided into two groups. The first is meteorites-finds, that is, those celestial bodies that unexpectedly seeped through the Earth's atmosphere and, having fallen, were lost in its bowels until they were accidentally discovered. The second conditional group consists of meteorites, the movement and fall of which was recorded by special devices, whose path to the Earth was tracked by scientists. These are meteorites. Any meteorite that has become famous gets its name from nearby geographical features, whether mountains or rivers, or nearby settlements.
Study of meteorite falls
As the famous chemist Ivan Mukhin said back in 1819, “the beginning of the legends about stones and iron blocks falling from the air is lost in the deepest darkness of the past centuries.”
Meteorites were known even to primitive people, thousands of years ago some of the tools of labor of these people were already made of iron brought to our planet by meteorites. Of course, such finds were accidental, making a tool for work, ancient man hardly guessed that this piece of iron came from outer space. Watching the unforgettable spectacle of a meteorite falling on the planet, a person turned the found fragment into an object of religious worship, in other words, a gift from the gods. There are numerous legends and tales about such gifts, once they were even chained to the ground with chains, so that they would not fly back into the sky, because such gifts were considered a blessing.
During the heyday Ancient Greece, many thinkers had a fairly correct idea of the origin of celestial bodies periodically falling to the Earth. For example, Anaxagoras wrote that the current meteorites are nothing more than fragments of solid celestial bodies or fragments of the Earth. Other thinkers of ancient Greece also believed that meteorites are fragments of the firmament. However, along with the decline Greek civilization these relatively correct ideas have been replaced by completely polar judgments. Their essence was reduced to anything, but not to the true reasons for the appearance of meteorites.
It was only in the 18th century that scientific rationale modern meteoritics. This was done by a fairly well-known at that time physicist from Germany, Ernst Chladni (1756-1827). 
It was this man who devoted part of his life to collecting descriptions of fireballs and their subsequent comparison with the information that is known about finds of meteorites. A book subsequently published entitled “On the Origin of the Iron Masses Found by Pallas and Other Similar Iron Masses and on Some Related Natural Phenomena” contained a lot of interesting data, in particular, about a huge sample of “native iron” found in 1749 by the Siberian blacksmith Yakov Medvedev, which weighed as much as 42 pounds (about 700 kg). As it turned out later, it was a fairly rare type of meteorite, consisting of rock and iron. It was decided to call such meteorites pallasites, in honor of Peter Pallas, an academician who studied the sought-for nugget. Chladni's book intelligibly and consistently proved the cosmic origin of the iron meteorite found in Siberia and other bodies that fell from the sky on our planet.
As already mentioned, meteorites can be either "fallen" or "found". If a celestial body was discovered somewhere and subsequently the analysis established its cosmic origin, then this is a typical case of a “found” meteorite. If someone managed to see the fall and subsequently discovered both the place of the fall and the meteorite itself, then such a celestial body is considered to be “fallen”.
The most famous cases of meteorites falling on the territory of Russia
The Laurentian Chronicle of 1091 already mentions the fall of such a body on the territory of present-day Russia, however, the details of this fall, alas, are not reported.
But already in the 20th century, several significant meteorite events happened, the largest of which occurred on June 30, 1908 under the Kamennaya Tungusska River. Only a three-year-old child does not know about the famous Tunguska meteorite. An explosion of power equivalent to an explosion of 1000 atomic bombs really shook the Earth's atmosphere. Everything happened at an altitude of about 8 km above the ground, and the shock wave, having rounded Earth several times, eventually led to the fact that in the epicenter of the incident within a radius of 40 km, trees were felled. At that time, fortunately, only deer died, due to the fact that the epicenter fell on deserted places, terrible consequences were avoided.
The political events that took place in Russia at the beginning of the century did not allow to study the place of the fall immediately. Scientists began this process much later, after as much as 20 years. And, having started the research, the scientific minds were very surprised by the absence of any debris in the epicenter. Without giving up hope, the researchers continued their research, however, they did not find anything. Most scientists agree that this is due to the fall of the comet nucleus on our planet.
The 20th century was marked by other cosmic phenomena. In today's Volgograd region on December 6, 1922, a whole rain of stone meteorites fell. However, traditionally traces of this event were discovered much later, in 1979. As it turned out, this cosmic rain passed over an area of 15 sq. km. Scientists managed to find 1.6 tons of fragments, the most representative of which had a weight of 284 kg. It is still considered the largest celestial body found in Russia, and the 3rd in the world.
There is another large and well-known meteorite observed during the fall - this is the Sikhote-Alin, it fell in 1947 on Far East. The bolide of this meteorite was so dazzling that it could be seen at 11 o'clock in the afternoon in Khabarovsk and other cities of this part of the world. Even after the trail in the air disappeared, a roar and rumble was heard for a long time, and the dusty trail dispersed for more than 2 hours. This time, the search went quickly, there was enough information about the observations.
Academicians Fesenkov V.G., who led the expedition. and Krinov E.L., found as many as 24 craters with a diameter of 9-27 m. There were many fragments of 3500 pieces, and all because the meteorite crumbled in flight. The composition of these fragments was also very curious - iron and some silicates. By calculation, the initial mass of the celestial body was calculated, it was about 70 tons, while the largest fragment found weighed 27 tons. At that time, a sparsely populated area also became the crash site, so no one was hurt.
Not so long ago, in May 1990, at 23:30, in Bashkiria, the local population witnessed the fall of a meteorite, later called Sterlitamak. People kept saying that in an instant, the sky was lit up with such a bright flash that it became light, as if the day had come abruptly, one could hear a deafening noise and crack, and such that the glass rang. Of course, researchers immediately went to the crash site to find a rather large crater, about 10 m in diameter and 5 m deep, and only two small iron fragments. They weighed only 6 and 3 kg. The excavation of the crater began immediately, largely due to the carelessness of this development, people missed the main fragment. Fortunately, children playing near the crater found him a year later, and he weighed 315 kg.
Light and sound effects that were observed during the fall, for example, Tunguska meteorite, are explained by scientists as short electrical discharges that always accompany his fall. Therefore, the “noise like the wings of hundreds of frightened birds,” which observers spoke of, has a completely logical scientific explanation.
At present, at least 500 tons of meteorite material are stored in many museums of the world. The calculation shows that in the form meteorites and meteoric dust, about 10 tons of matter falls on the Earth per day, which over a period of 2 billion years gives a layer 10 cm thick.
The source of almost all small meteor particles are, apparently, comets. Large meteoroids have asteroid origin.
Russian scientists - Academician V. G. Fesenkov, S. V. Orlov and others believe that meteorites and meteorites are closely related. Asteroids are giant meteorites, and meteorites are very small, dwarf meteorites. Both are fragments of planets that, billions of years ago, moved around the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. These planets apparently fell apart as a result of the collision. Countless fragments of various sizes were formed, down to the smallest grains. These fragments are now rushing in interplanetary space and, colliding with the Earth, fall on it in the form meteorites.
In some cases, a large meteoroid during its movement in the atmosphere does not have time to evaporate and reaches the Earth's surface. This remnant of a meteoroid is called a meteorite. Approximately 2000 meteorites.
Depending on the chemical composition meteorites are subdivided into stony chondrites (their relative abundance is 85.7%), stony achondrites (7.1%), iron (5.7%), and iron- stone meteorites(1.5%). Chondrules are small round particles of gray color, often with a brown tint, abundantly interspersed in the stone mass.
Iron meteorites are almost entirely composed of nickel iron. It follows from the calculations that the observed structure of iron meteorites is formed if, in the temperature range from about 600 to 400 C, the substance is cooled at a rate of 1? - 10? C for a million years.
Stony meteorites that do not have chondrules are called achondrites. The analysis showed that chondrules contain almost all chemical elements.
The eight elements most commonly found in meteorites are iron, nickel, sulfur, magnesium, silicon, aluminium, calcium, and oxygen. All other chemical elements of the periodic table are found in meteorites in negligible, microscopic quantities. When combined chemically, these elements form various minerals. Most of these minerals are found in terrestrial rocks. And absolutely in insignificant quantities in meteorites were found such minerals that are not and cannot be on Earth, since it has an atmosphere with a high content of oxygen. Combining with oxygen, these minerals form other substances. Iron meteorites are almost entirely composed of iron combined with nickel, while stony meteorites are mainly composed of minerals called silicates. They are composed of compounds of magnesium, aluminum, calcium, silicon and oxygen.
Particularly interesting internal structure iron meteorites. Their polished surfaces become shiny like a mirror. If such a surface is etched with a weak solution of acid, then usually an intricate pattern appears on it, consisting of individual strips and narrow borders intertwined with each other. On the surfaces of some meteorites after etching, parallel thin lines appear. All this is the result of the internal crystalline structure of iron meteorites. No less interesting is the structure of stone meteorites. If you look at the break of a stone meteorite, then often even with the naked eye you can see small rounded balls scattered over the surface of the break. These balls sometimes reach the size of a pea. In addition to them, scattered tiny shiny particles are visible in the fracture. white color. These are nickel iron inclusions. Among these particles there are golden sparkles - inclusions of a mineral consisting of iron in combination with sulfur. There are meteorites, which are, as it were, an iron sponge, in the voids of which grains of a yellowish-green color of the mineral olivine are enclosed.
Titarenko Sergey
Graduated from the Military Space Academy. A. F. Mozhaisky, retraining courses of the Air Force Academy. Professor N. E. Zhukovsky, specialty "Research natural resources aerospace means. Earth remote sensing and intelligence specialist outer space. After his dismissal from the Armed Forces, he taught geography at the Air Force Academy. Professor N. E. Zhukovsky. Currently, he is an employee of one of the divisions of Roscosmos.
Man is always afraid of the unknown, the incomprehensible. This gives rise to a lot of rumors, prejudices. And it's good when events and their causes are not hushed up when information reaches people.
One of the reasons for the fears associated with the fall of the Chebarkul meteorite was that in Lately The teaching of astronomy was discontinued in schools. Otherwise, everyone would know about space bodies ah, surrounding our planet, our solar system, the laws of their motion.
So I'll start with some information.
In our case, we are interested in three types of cosmic bodies "living" in the solar system. These are asteroids, comets and meteoroids.
Asteroids are small planets of the solar system with a diameter from 1000 (Cetsera) to several hundred kilometers. The orbits of 40,000 asteroids have now been calculated. Most of them are located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, forming the so-called "main belt". But not all of them behave so "disciplined". Some come closer to the Sun than Mercury, some go beyond the orbit of Saturn. The asteroids of the Apollo group, which are very close to the Earth's orbit, can disturb us. On December 8, 1992, the asteroid Tautatis flew by the Earth at a distance of 3.6 million km. Theoretically, once every hundred years, one of the asteroids of the Apollo group can come close to the Earth, and in the worst case, collide with it. This will release energy equal to the explosion of 10,000 hydrogen bombs with a capacity of 10 Mt. A crater with a diameter of 20 km is formed. Draw your own conclusions.
Comets are small bodies in the solar system and tend to revolve around the sun. There are millions of them. A comet has a head and a tail. The head is a solid core, consisting of ice with an admixture of stony and ferruginous particles, and also a gaseous environment. The nuclei of most comets are several kilometers across. Their orbits are rather randomly oriented in space, some intersect the orbits of planets, including the Earth. The orbital periods of comets can range from a few years to millions of years. There is an assumption that the fall of the Tunguska meteorite in 1908 in the region of Podkamennaya Tunguska was actually a collision of the Earth with a fragment of the nucleus of the comet Encke. In 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy crashed into the atmosphere of Jupiter, causing a powerful disturbance.
Meteoroid matter is small celestial bodies ranging in size from a speck of dust to a block. Unlike the asteroids and comets described above, their motion is difficult to predict, both because of their magnitude, which makes them difficult to observe, and because of their huge amount. This is a kind of "space rubble".
Small particles entering the Earth's atmosphere become meteorites that burn up in its upper layers. Then we see "star rain". Large celestial bodies - fireballs - do not have time to burn up in the atmosphere and fall to the surface. The weight of such bodies is several thousand tons. About 2,000 meteorites fall to Earth every year.
When large meteorites fall, craters are formed. The largest meteorite crater on Earth is located in Arizona near Diablo Canyon. Its diameter is 1265 m.
According to their composition, meteorites are divided into iron (siderites), stony-iron (siderolites) and stone (aerolites). Stone, in turn, are divided into chondrites and achondrites. This difference is due to their composition.
It is to chondrites that the meteorite that visited us a month ago belongs.
And we can count ourselves lucky. The fact is that iron meteorites do not explode in the air and reach the surface of the Earth. In this case, the consequences would be much worse. And in our case, the car collapsed in the air, at high altitude, which reduced its damaging effect. As it has already become clear to you, the fall of celestial bodies to Earth is a rather trivial event. All envy is only on the size and composition of these bodies. Their fall can occur anywhere on the planet.
It is extremely difficult, almost impossible, to predict, calculate or predict their fall. Our space control systems have other tasks, and weapons are not able to hit targets entering the atmosphere at such angles and at such speeds. Even the system of optical control of outer space of the Aerospace Defense of Russia is unable to perform such tasks, because. monitors, albeit for small-sized objects at long ranges, but in certain areas of outer space.
So there is no need to build speculation, inflate panic, but we must rely on facts.
And for greater clarity, we drew the following diagram for you:
- Where do meteorites come from?
There is an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Such fragments fly there - asteroids - from thousand kilometers to meters, millimeters. Stone, metal, metal-stone. And they constantly collide with each other, change their trajectory and fall into the Earth's gravitational field. And when they fall to Earth, they are called meteorites.
How did this asteroid belt come about?
There is such a law - each next planet is about twice as far from the Sun as the previous one. Let's say Earth is twice as far from the Sun as Venus, Mars is twice as far from the Sun as Earth. And it turns out that there is a kind of "hole" between Mars and Jupiter. That is, this space is not filled with a planet, it is not there. But there are a lot of asteroids circling there. That is, these fragments are a kind of remnants of a protoplanetary gas and dust nebula that did not go into the formation of the planet. How were these asteroids formed? There are two hypotheses. The first is that there was also a planet there and it was called Phaeton. That is, there was Mars, Phaeton, Jupiter. But due to the fact that Jupiter is very powerful, it contributed to the disintegration of the planet Phaeton, and we have its remnants. The second hypothesis of researchers, to which I belong, is that Jupiter did not allow the planet to form. He changed the orbits of these asteroids so much, did not give them the opportunity to come together. And if you look at meteorites, they testify to how asteroids constantly collided in space and crumbled into even smaller fragments.
- But other planets were able to form, unlike Phaethon?
There is such scientific term- accretion, that is, sticking together. The earth and all the planets, and the same asteroids, were formed as a result of the adhesion of the original dust - less than a thousandth and a millionth of a millimeter. But where there is an asteroid belt, this process of accretion did not take place to the end.
What is the practical significance of meteorites?
Previously - until the 19th century - it was believed that meteorites did not carry scientific significance. But now there is a very rapid development of the instrumental base for research, which allows you to work with very small objects. These studies over the past 25-30 years have made a kind of revolution in the study of cosmic matter. Now it is fashionable to talk about stem cells in biology, which provide information about how the development of the whole organism occurs. So, meteorites are a kind of stem cells of the solar system. If you study them, you get information about the earliest stages of the development of the solar system. The meteorites are about 4.6 billion years old. That is, they talk about what happened at the stage of the origin of the gas and dust nebula, which preceded the creation of the solar system.
- But scientists have not always recognized the existence of asteroids that fall to Earth as meteorites ...
For the first time, the fall of a meteorite was recorded in writing in 2133 BC in China. However, "heavenly stones" received scientific recognition only in early XIX century. It is known that indications of meteorites for a long time ignored the Paris Academy of Sciences, and even such an authoritative chemist as Antoine Lavoisier argued that "the fall of stones from the sky is physically impossible." At first it seemed that there is Earth and air. How then can a stone fall out of thin air? This was contrary to all physical laws that were known at the time. But when in the 19th century they began to study samples of stone meteorites under a microscope, they saw that there were no such rocks on Earth, that is, in other words, there were no such stones. And then they began to talk about what, perhaps, this is from the asteroid belt, which at that time had already begun to be observed.
I wonder from what sources scientists learn about the fall of meteorites? Is it mostly eyewitness accounts?
Our department, the department of cosmoecology and space mineralogy, together with the Committee on Meteorites of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, is the only organization that is engaged in both the collection and study of space samples. We receive a lot of information about space debris. These are details of space satellites. People saw that it flew, burned, fell. People ran up, it is hot, burned. It even has a melting crust, but these are not meteorites. I remember how in the 1970s police officers called us from Shpola Cherkasskaya. A sample weighing about six kilograms broke through the roof and crashed into the stone floor by 6 cm. Unfortunately, it was not a meteorite, but some kind of man-made fragment. Since it has been enriched with refractory chemical elements, then, most likely, belonged to the combustion chamber of one of the satellites, which are currently very numerous in near-Earth orbit. By the way, meteorite falls often occur under interesting circumstances. One of the first meteorites recorded in Ukraine Zhigailovka (Sumy region, 1787) landed in front of the shepherds, who thought that some black bird had fallen. The find ended up in ... pharmacies, where it lay for 16 years, until they found out about it at Kharkov University and took it into their collection. The fall of the stone meteorite Yurtuk (Zaporozhye region, 1936) was preceded by the appearance of a bright fireball in the sky, the flight of which was accompanied by roaring, rattling and whistling. One of the fragments of this meteorite was found in the attic of the house. A similar story happened in Donetsk in 1969 - the Andreevka meteorite shot through the roof of the house.
- And what is the probability of a meteorite hitting a person?
There have never been such cases in history, and they are unlikely. It is known that in 1860 one of the samples meteor shower Ohio in the US killed a foal, and in 1914 a sample of the Nakla meteorite in Egypt killed a dog. More dangerous from this point of view is the fall of satellite debris.
What are the sizes of meteorites?
Meteorites are found from small sizes up to tens of tons. For example, a sample of an iron meteor shower in Sikhote-Alin (Russia) is 0.3 mg. And the Goba iron meteorite in Namibia weighs 60 tons.
- There is such a thing as "black" archeology. Is there a "black" meteorite?
Previously, only scientists were engaged in meteorites. And for them, these are truly invaluable examples. Because if we want to get samples, for example, of the Moon, we invest a lot of money. Some apparatus should fly there, there should be a program. Also, programs for the exploration of Mars are huge funds. Here, the samples themselves fall to Earth, they are free. And in the early 1990s, only scientists were doing this. Since the 1990s, when collectors became interested in meteorites, we have been afraid that something from our collection would be stolen from us. When we go on an expedition, we worry that the so-called “black” meteorites will find out about this and buy some samples from the peasants, because this will ruin science. We have the Subsoil Code, which says that, in particular, meteorites are the property of the state. Now the oligarchs are beginning to take an interest in meteorites. And they contact me directly so that we can conduct an examination of what they have and, perhaps, sell them something from our collection. In the world, meteoritics is considered an elite science. And sometimes they come up to me at international conferences abroad and say: “You poor country. What is your collection for? Sell it."
- And how many meteorites does the Ukrainian collection have?
The Ukrainian collection has 90 meteorites from 25 countries of the world, it is stored in the Natural History Museum of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The collection was founded in the century before last with the assistance of Kiev University. Our collection is known among scientists due to the presence in it of the Krymka meteorite, unique in its cosmic nature, which, as part of a meteor shower, fell in 1946 in Nikolaev region. The meteorite contains fragments of an exotic cosmic substance that is not found in other meteorites and is very close in its characteristics to minerals comets.
- How many meteorites fell on the territory of Ukraine?
A total of 43 meteorites have been recorded. Stone meteorites predominate among Ukrainian samples - 39 specimens. Found also 4 iron. Unfortunately, in Ukraine there was no fall of another type - iron-stone meteorites. Among the finds registered on the territory of our country, the majority are meteorites that fell to Earth in the form of one solid body.
A meteorite that fell in the Chelyabinsk region made a lot of noise in the region itself, but also in the media and the World Wide Web. Indeed, we have heard a lot of talk about the discovery of meteorites, about the possible fight against this danger. In fact, it turned out that neither international nor Russian systems the discovery in this case of a fairly decent meteorite about 3 m in size and weighing about 30 tons turned out to be completely useless.
In this regard, the question arises of how often such phenomena occur and what awaits us in the future.
As noted in one of the reviews on comets:
“A lot depends on how comets originated (or are still occurring!) But it is precisely the origin of comets that has remained a mystery to science for hundreds of years.
Although the laws governing the movement of planets, asteroids and comets are the same, their behavior and habitats are very different. The orbits of planets and asteroids are ellipses close to circles. Orbits of comets are elongated ellipses, almost parabolas. The planets move in the plane of the ecliptic in the same direction. The paths of comets are a real tangle of orbits, oriented in space quite arbitrarily. Comets move along them one - against, others - clockwise.
Here it makes sense to recall modern ideas on the structure of asteroid and comet formations. A significant part of the asteroids move in the so-called main asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Jupiter perturbs their movements, as a result of which the asteroids collide with each other, changing their orbits. Some of them can come closer to the Sun or, conversely, climb farther from it than most of the minor planets.
In 1950, the Dutch cosmogonist Jan Oort suggested that the solar system is surrounded by a giant cloud of cometary bodies (numbering, according to him, up to 1011 bodies), located at distances from 20,000 to 200,000 AU.
It is assumed that during the growth of giant planets (primarily Jupiter and Saturn), when they reach a sufficiently large mass, gravitational perturbations become so strong that they begin to massively eject comets from the annular zones closest to their orbits.
solar system
Almost all of the bodies that did not enter the planets and those located in these zones flew to the outer regions of the solar system.
In 1951, Kuiper hypothesized that, along with the Oort cloud, there was another reservoir of comets. The first Kuiper belt object, located at a distance of 41 AU, was discovered in 1992. It was named 1992QB1. Currently, more than 400 such objects have been discovered, the size of which exceeds 200 km, located far beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. By modern estimates, in the Kuiper belt up to 35,000 objects larger than 100 km, and total strength bodies, according to experts, is estimated at several billion. Consequently, the Kuiper belt has a total mass hundreds of times greater than the so-called main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
Now imagine that the solar system was covered by a shock wave from a supernova explosion. In addition to the fact that it itself affects the asteroid and comet belts, it leads to a change in the orbits of small objects. That is, in addition to the direct impact of the shock wave on the Earth, which occurred during the explosion of the supernova SN1987A, which led to a change in the planet's rotation speed, one can also expect the indirect impact of comets and asteroids that have changed their usual orbits under the influence of the same shock wave.
Almost 26 years have passed since the explosion of these stars, so the area meteor shower between Mars and Jupiter could well have an additional impact, both meteorites and comets, on the space surrounding the Earth.
