[meteorite-list] An alternative origin of tektites

From: Gerald Flaherty <grf2_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Sat Mar 26 17:14:29 2005
Message-ID: <006601c53251$2a36c760$6401a8c0_at_Dell>

We live in exciting times! Jerry
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sterling K. Webb" <kelly_at_bhil.com>
To: "Graham Christensen" <voltage_at_telus.net>;
<Meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2005 12:26 PM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] An alternative origin of tektites


> 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
>
>
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Received on Sat 26 Mar 2005 05:14:21 PM PST