by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Rocks arouse more interest when they come from outer space, thus becoming meteorites.
"Asteroids tell us about the early history, the dawn of the solar system," said Horton Newsom, curator of UNM's Meteorite Museum and Collection. "The rocks are part of the story of how the solar system formed and evolved. Instead of using the world's largest telescopes to study how the solar system and universe formed, we use some of the world's most powerful microscopes to study how these things formed."
The museum is part of the Institute of Meteoritics, established
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in 1944.
"We've had a long history of being involved in space exploration, well before there were rockets going off the earth," Newsom said. "It's one of the original institutes for studying objects from space."
The museum's collection holds more than 5,000 individual specimens, representing more than 600 meteorites. The star sample of the collection is a half-ton meteorite found in a farmer's field in Kansas.
"It's the second largest stony meteorite ever recovered," Newsom said. "It's called Norton County (they're named after where they're found). It came from an asteroid that melted 4.5 million years ago. That's a very interesting sample."
The museum also has a tiny sample from Mars.
Assistant curator Barbara Cohen, who has made two trips to Antarctica to search for meteorites, said there are misconceptions about them - one being that they land fiery hot.
"When the rock comes through the atmosphere, it heats up the outside, but the inside doesn't get hot," Cohen said. "The inside stays cold, so a lot of times, when you find it when it just lands, it's got frost on it. Most people think that it comes in, and it's steaming hot. We get that all the time."
She said that the other day, a man brought in a sample he claimed was found still hot.
"He brought me a piece of coal and said he saw it fall out of the sky," Cohen said. "I said, 'I have no explanation for why a piece of coal fell out of the sky and was sizzling hot. But it's not a meteorite, sorry.'"
They're also irregularly shaped in general.
"Sometimes people bring in these totally round and smooth things, but meteorites aren't like that," she said. "They're kind of lumpy."
Also, they contain nickel-iron metal flakes that attract weak refrigerator magnets.
"That's one of the key signs," Newsom said. "Unfortunately, they're very rare. Only about one in 100 samples people bring in actually turn out to be meteorites. You have to be careful that it's metal and not crystals."
Cohen said all the original elements and pieces of the solar system are packed into one
meteorite.
"If you're not so interested in rocks, it may not make that big a connection," Cohen said of the museum. "But these rocks are so old. They're older than anything on the earth, because the earth has plate tectonics and erosion and water and wind and stuff like that.
And asteroids and on the moon, they don't have that. These rocks are so old - they're from the very beginning of the solar system."
Meteorite Museum and Collection
Northrop Hall
Monday-Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m.
Free
