[meteorite-list] Another Meteorite Lands in Norway?

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Mon Jul 10 11:20:28 2006
Message-ID: <200607101518.IAA08253_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1383090.ece

Another meteorite hits Norway
Aftenpoften (Norway)
July 10, 2006

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

Bj?rn Herigstad says he found the meteorite just outside his house at
Orre, in the J?ren district just south of Stavanger in Rogaland County.
When he went outside Sunday morning, he found a crater on his property,
about 25 centimeters deep.

"I couldn't understand why there was such a hole and just started
filling it in," Herigstad told local newspaper J?rbladet.

But then he found an unusual stone a few meters from the crater. "It's
the oddest stone I've ever seen," he said.

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," he said. "What if it had hit our house? It would have gone
right through the roof. I wonder whether our insurance would have
covered it."

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

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. The University of Oslo's astro-physics
department has a full report of the meteorite on its web site that's in
Norwegian only, but it's possible to see a photo
<http://www.astro.uio.no/ita/nyheter/ildkule06/ildkule06.html> of that
meteor before it hit.

Knut J?rgen ?degaard, an astronomer at the University of Oslo, agreed
that the meteor at J?ren 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 (more than USD 100,000).

"We had just been wondering whether a cabin we're building is getting
too expense, and then this falls out of the sky," he said with a laugh.
Received on Mon 10 Jul 2006 11:18:00 AM PDT