[meteorite-list] An alternative origin of tektites

From: Sterling K. Webb <kelly_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat Mar 26 12:30:39 2005
Message-ID: <42459B38.7E973339_at_bhil.com>

Hi, Graham, List.

    The notion derives from the curious history of the "Chant Trace." On
February 9, 1913, there were a huge rash of fireball reports stretching from
far Western Canada (Regina) across to upper New York state and New York City
itself. The numbers of reports were in the hundreds or thousands, and they were
of "trains" of multiple fireballs that passed overhead, followed by more
"trains" of multiple fireballs, followed by more "trains" of multiple fireballs,
a show lasting 10-15 minutes at a time.
    This is highly unusual, to put it mildly. A Canadian astronomer named Chant
investigated it at length and was able to plot a great circle path for these
events and to determine that the reports were chronologically compatible, that
is, in correct sequence. He concluded that there actually had been a "train" of
hundreds of fireballs chasing themselves across North America. He even found
reports from ships at sea, as far away as the South Atlantic off Brazil, that
matched up. He published his results in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical
Society of Canada in 1913, but he never explained what would cause such a
remarkable event. It is now referred to as the "Chant Trace."
    In the 1950's, John O'Keefe jumped on the obvious conclusion (which
hopefully the sharp ones among us have already guessed) that the only way to
account for this was the decay of an object from low earth orbit! He conducted
a search of 8,000 local newspapers across the US and Canada
for reports of such fireball trains and plotted the results on the map. He
discovered that there TWO stripes of fireball trains, parallel to each other but
with the second one displaced to the south. Whatever the decaying object was,
it survived through TWO passes of the Earth's atmosphere.
    This argues a substantial object, big, massing millions of pounds, caught in
an gravitationally bound geocentric orbit! Now, it may have been a "fresh"
capture, an object that approaches the Earth at low encounter velocities, glazes
the atmosphere, is captured, and immediately decays and breaks up, in which the
Earth has a second "moon" for a couple of hours. OR, it could be the final
moments of a second "moon" that has been in place, undetected, for thousands or
millions of years.
    An object of a few hundred meters diameter would never have been detected
directly by XIXth century astronomy. But there are all those anomalous
"transit" events from XIXth century astronomers, you know, often touted as proof
of the discovery of a new planet, intra-Mercurian. There is a famous case of
such a detection during a solar eclipse which didn't pan out, and so forth.
Check discoveries of "Vulcan." (No, not that Vulcan, Trekites!)
    O'Keefe coined the term "Cyrillids" for such objects, but it never caught
on. He proposed that the decay of short term natural satellites of a silicate
composition was the source of tektites, that the Earth had had four such "moons"
in the last 35 million years, each one creating a tektite strewn field in its
final decay, a perfectly good dynamic conclusion, but, you know, folks didn't
take to the notion of a lot of extra moons!
    The idea was revived in the past 20 years by somebody whose name I can't
remember, who threw in the notion of rings, also dynamically possible. That's
probably the article you saw. I recall a popular article from the mid-80's that
was illustrated with an artist's rendering of a tropical island night scene
looking out over the ocean with the Earth's Rings arcing across the sky!
Personally, I like it. Why should Saturn have all the fun?

Sterling Webb
----------------------------------------------------
Graham Christensen wrote:

  I read an article in the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada journal that
said that the Earth once had a ring of tektites or a system of rings around it
and when the supercontinent pangea formed, the earth's gravitational field
became lop-sided and the tektite material in the ring ended up in an orbital
resonance with pangea and the tektites formed a clump or "ring arc" that was
directly over pangea at perigee. When pangea broke up, the resonance dissapeared
and the ring arc's orbit began to decay The shape and distribution of the
australasian tektite strewnfield and the ablasion characteristics of the
tektites is consistent with a ring arc's orbit decaying and eventually bringing
the material crashing to earth at a low angle.

  Furthermore, the tektites associated with the chesapeake bay crater may in
fact have been dragged down by the impactor's gravitational field as it passed
through or near the rings and this may be the case with other tektite fields as
well.

  I have the article here on paper but I can't find it on the internet. I'm not
sure if this has been posted before but if anyone's interested I could type up
the text and E-mail it to the list.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  Graham Christensen
  voltage_at_telus.net
  http://www.geocities.com/aerolitehunter
  msn messenger: majorvoltage_at_hotmail.com
Received on Sat 26 Mar 2005 12:26:16 PM PST