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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."
Obviously it's Kryptonite
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.
"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it."
"Green life? Ok, Bones, leave the ... diplomacy to me!"
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
Mercury's gravity is rather weak (1/20 Earth's mass), and it has no atmosphere to speak of. A rock getting enough kinetic energy to escape Mercury's gravity isn't that hard to imagine.
The tricky part of this scenario is getting the rock enough kinetic energy to boost it from Mercury's orbit out to Earth. I'd guess a slingshot around the sun was probably needed.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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
any high speed impact in which the ejecta achieves escape velocity. Fairly easy to do, if you have either a large enough impactor or one moving fast enough (28,000mph is fairly slow yet fast enough to achieve escape velocity even in Earth's gravity influence).
BTW, there are other bodies in the solar system, other than Earth, with active volcanoes. Two examples: Venus and Io. In fact, Io is the most geologically active body in the entire solar system, due solely to its proximity to Jupiter and the fact that there is a thirty Terawatt polar torus connecting the two. Io's volcanoes regularly throw debris into orbit.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
The most likely scenario is that an impact knocks a rock off the surface of a planet or moon (Mercury, for example) with enough energy that the rock starts orbiting the sun instead of the planet. It would most likely be on a fairly eccentric orbit in that case and that orbit might cross the orbit of another planet (like the Earth). When the second planet happens to be in the same place as the rock, it falls as a meteor.
Do they have April 1st in Morocco, or do they run on an Islamic calendar
I'd guess a slingshot around the sun was probably needed.
It's got to be something massive moving relative to the Sun, probably Mercury and/or Venus.
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.
I think we should leave the making up of crazy shit to the crazies, whithout adding an extra layer of "crazy shit I suppose they would make up" to it. There's enough bullcrap around without that ;)
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The tricky part of this scenario is getting the rock enough kinetic energy to boost it from Mercury's orbit out to Earth. I'd guess a slingshot around the sun was probably needed.
How does something slingshot around the sun? I am aware of planetary slingshots, but they depend upon the planet's orbital speed around the sun. I could see how the sun will change the direction of the object, but not how it could impart more kinetic energy to the object.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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.