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Green Meteorite Found In Morocco May Be From Mercury
An anonymous reader writes in with news that a meteorite found in Morocco might be from Mercury. "The green rock found in Morocco last year may be the first known visitor from the solar system's innermost planet, according to meteorite scientist Anthony Irving, who unveiled the new findings this month at the 44th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas. The study suggests that a space rock called NWA 7325 came from Mercury, and not an asteroid or Mars."
Just sayin'.
Obviously it's Kryptonite
Green meteorite? C'mon man. It's so obviously from Kryptoin! We'll find out in 25 years when we have to kneel before Zod!!
I'd guess it was "Straight Outta Compton"
And women are from Venus.
My guess is it's a snot rocket from God.
Lets break up the inevitable flood of cheesy Kryptonite jokes... I am no expert in astrogeology but I can still see how it is possible to tell that a rock dropped to Earth from space, it will have signs of being heated during entry into the Earth's atmosphere etc... I can also see how there might be a difference between planetary rocks formed during geological processes under the influence of gravity and objects that formed in space. But how is it possible to prove beyond a doubt that a rock came from a particular planet/moon in the solar system?
it get green? Left in the fridge too long?
Table-ized A.I.
The Proof is in repeating the headline rapidly twenty times.
CAPTCHA = redesign
"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it."
"Green life? Ok, Bones, leave the ... diplomacy to me!"
how does a rock get separated from mercury? if for example there was a meteorite hitting the mercury and braking off pieces, wouldn't gravity of mercury pulled them back to the surface of mercury? another option... a vulcano exploding pieces. i haven't heard of any active vulcanos on other planets though....
Are they sure it's not green cheese from the Moon?
Maybe it's from Krypton! :P
What is the use of the article without a picture of the said meteorite.
Seriously its a real article, thought the april fools had kicked in
Kryptonite!
Meanwhile, in Kansas, a farmer and his wife are happy to announce the birth of their son. According to friends and family, Martha never appeared pregnant, not for a day.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Apparently there are very few green-colored mercury compounds*; most of them tend to be reddish or white. So if the mercury you left in the fridge is turning green, because you've got a bunch of chromate ions floating around inside, you've got at least two problems in your fridge... and you don't usually see that kind of behaviour in a major appliance.
(* That's based on Google/Wikipedia searches; it's been a while since I've done real chemistry, and it's possible there's also some green organometallic mercury compound, but most of the ones I could find were reds or whites. It's also possible that you've got some mercury-tolerant molds growing on the organic debris floating on top of your bowl of mercury, but I'm still not gonna eat anything from your fridge.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm sure some superstitious Islamists will take it a green rock as a sign from Allah. The crazy stories/claims that emerge should be amusing.
ps. for those that don't know, green is the color of Islam (and in other cultures in ages past, of demons and Satan himself; although its all anti-scientific and conrtadictory superstitious nonsense; just letting ya know the trivia).
Someone at some point thought it was from Mars, which seems absurd. The rock is GREEN! If it came from the red planet, don't you think it would be... some other color, perhaps... red?
Well, time for me to take my annual break from reading /., since tomorrow is the day people DELIBERATELY post bullshit for their own amusement. I guess I shouldn't take umbrage to this practice, after all, it's only good practice for the rest of the year when the bullshit is less obvious. (sigh...)
Usually you are able to tell where a meteorite is from by the different types of rocks and minerals it contains so for it to come from Mercury it should have the same composition as Mercury. And also I think that it is very funny that it was green. Maybe it was a green man from Mercury who didn't have any limbs.
Do they have April 1st in Morocco, or do they run on an Islamic calendar
This sounds like the frivolous science from the past decades. Before this meteorite from 'Mercury' there was a meteorite allegedly from 'Mars'. They even fooled poor president Clinton to utter upon it. http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/snc/clinton.html
It is April 1st today, but these mercurian reports from a dude called Irving came yesterday.
Don't the scientists at NASA and elsewhere have anything better to do than identify earthlings rocks as extraterrestrial. Self-deception is indeed a strong force, but this is getting out of hands.
It's from Northwest Airlines flight 7325, more specifically, it's from your anus.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Well, there's only one way, really. You go to that planet or moon, pick up a rock, and bring it home. We can prove beyond a doubt that the moon rocks the astronauts brought home did, in fact, come from Earth's moon. At least, that's where they most recently came from before coming to Earth.
However, in "Science Journalism" which is something loosely inspired by sloppy research and egregious overstatements made by scientists while pumping for grants and attention, if a rock has characteristics that resemble the characteristics of rocks found on some other planet or moon, we confidently state that it came from there. It's called "leaping to conclusions", and misrepresenting hypotheses in this way is a big industry that forms the basis of Science Journalism.
Take the Big Bang theory for an example. We have a working theory, based on a real observation (that all matter we can detect appears to be expanding outwards from a point) and nobody has come up with a better explanation (yet) so in the world of Science Journalism it's an incontrovertible fact that all matter was once contained in a single point. See how that works? You just jump straight from "this is an idea that represents a possibility, which we can work with" to "this is absolute truth that only heretics and savages don't worship".
It's this kind of abandonment of logic and reason, and the substitution of pseudo-scientific dogma for true skepticism or conditional belief, that allows stuff like global warming denialism to prosper. You deflect the conversation from what's reasonable and logically provable to a discussion of the relative stature of the priests, er, I meant scientists, and their religious, er, I meant political affiliations. Evidence be damned, I have magazines.
"Ugly bag of mostly water"
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"It's ... it's green."
The meteorite that landed in Morocco was described in Sky_and_Telescope for May 2013, pg 12, with a photo of a 5 cm rectangular bright green fragment. The bright green mineral is diopside. Spectra from Mercury messenger match Ensteite, both minerals have large amounts of Mg and Ca, but are typically lower in Fe. The chemistry of the meteorite and the geochemistry measured from space are close but not exact. Mercury has one of the most battered surfaces in the solar sytstem and I thought that its greater average density would make for a large metal core, the most common metal being iron. Either there is a big probably frozen iron core but the crust is very well differentiated geochemically so that there isn't much Fe at the surface. Perhaps the period of intense bombardment that all bodies went through about 3.7 BYA (I think) caused the Fe to melt out of the crust.