• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Rare Walnut-Sized Chunks Of Meteorite That Exploded Over Germany Have Been Found

January 26, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Earlier this week, for only the eighth time ever, an asteroid that actually came with a rare 95-minute warning exploded in the sky over Germany and the hunt began for any potential pieces of meteorite that survived burning up in the atmosphere and fell to Earth. Now, researchers think they have found them. 

Fragments of asteroid 2024 BX1 about the size of a walnut have been recovered by researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and colleagues, and will be now examined to confirm they come from the celestial object. 2024 BX1 was only the eighth-ever object predicted to have a 100 percent chance of colliding with Earth.

Advertisement

The asteroid was first detected about three hours before impact. Krisztián Sárneczky at Piszkéstető Mountain Station of the Konkoly Observatory near Budapest, Hungary spotted it in the sky and reported the finding to the Minor Planet Center. This is the international system containing a database of all the small bodies that move through the Solar System. The data is then shared automatically with other astronomers.

This system is not fool-proof, as we have recently learned with the dangerous asteroid that never existed, but it’s better to have some false positives and catch all the real ones, too. Thanks to Scout, another automated system that tracks the trajectory of newly discovered objects, it became clear that asteroid 2024 BX1 was going to slam into Earth.

a black rock is found on a brown patch of soil. A ruler is next to it showing that it is a few centimeters across

The meteorite as it was found on the ground.

Image Credit: Cevin Dettlaff

The bright fireball from the object was seen as far away from the Czech Republic. The fragments (if they survived the destruction of their parent body) were expected to fall west of Berlin, in Havelland where these small fragments have been found.

2024 BX1 had an estimated size of about 1 meter (3 feet), which isn’t even worth measuring in giraffes, so it did not raise any major alarm bells. Disintegration as it passed through the atmosphere was a certainty. But collecting the potential surviving pieces is very important. If they are caught early enough, then they will remain relatively unexposed to Earth, potentially providing almost pristine samples of asteroids – not as good as what missions like OSIRIS-REx brought back, but this was home-delivered. 

Advertisement



Research on meteorites and sample retrieval missions are vital in helping us answer fundamental questions about the formation of the Solar System. Asteroid prediction systems are also vital for Earth’s safety, showing that a potentially threatening object that could cause some damage can be detected with time to notify or evacuate the affected population. There are still limitations to our planetary defense systems but in the last few years, there have been incredible strides forward in protecting humanity from possibly dangerous near-Earth Objects.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Paris ramps up security as jihadist attacks trial starts
  2. Cricket-‘Western bloc’ has let Pakistan down, board chief says
  3. Ancient Bison Found In Permafrost Is So Well Preserved Scientists Want To Clone It
  4. Where Inside Us Do We Feel Love?

Source Link: Rare Walnut-Sized Chunks Of Meteorite That Exploded Over Germany Have Been Found

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version