Post by Chicago Astronomer - Astro Joe on Aug 9, 2006 22:36:38 GMT -6
Meteorite plummets through Norwegian roof
For the first time since 1969 a meteorite has reportedly struck a European roof.
The nearly 25-ounce meteorite landed on the roof of a warehouse in Moss, Norway, about 40 miles south of Oslo.
"It must have had incredible speed and force, and had made a hole in a steel plate in the roof," a warehouse spokesman told Aftenposten.
Norwegian Astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard said the incident is the first since 1969 in which a meteorite has gone through a roof anywhere in Europe.
The meteorite is a so-called carbon CO-meteorite. Previously only five falls of CO-meteorites have been observed on Earth, and the last one occurred in Russia in 1937, he told Afterposten.
On July 14 a huge fireball flared across the sky in the southeast part of eastern Norway. The Norgesgruppen meteorite is believe part of the object that broke up over eastern Norway.
Source: www.physorg.com/news74360250.html
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Meteorite dust showers Norway outhouse
OSLO, Norway, July 17 (UPI) -- A Norwegian bus driver had an eventful summer holiday when fragments of a meteorite landed on his property.
Ragnar Martinsen was in the outhouse of his cabin at Rygge when he heard an explosion, the newspaper Aftenposten reported. He assumed the news was some sort of military exercise until he emerged and found that some aluminum plates left outside had picked up tiny pieces of rock.
Martinsen still did not realize he had received dust from outer space until his brother-in-law told him that the explosion he had heard was a meteorite coming down over Oslo.
He called Knut Jorgen Roed Odegaard at the University of Oslo and Morten Bilet of the Norwegian Astronomical Society, and they trekked out to the cabin.
"This is Norway's 14th meteorite, but we've never heard about a meteorite landing so close to a person before," Bilet told Aftenposten.
Martinsen gave the meteorite fragments to the two astronomers for the museum.
Source: www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060718-125444-7154r
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There have been a lot of Meteors slamming into Norway recently. Are we at the leading edge of something?