I was really excited to obtain this slice of a Stony Iron Pallasite Meteorite. It is only tiny but really heavy and has the loveliest Olivine patterns. Pallasites are some of the most attractive and rare meteorites.
You can see this in my stock list here along with many other lovely and unusual minerals and fossils.
Pallasite is a rare form of a stony-iron meteorite. It consists of nickel and iron but has a lovely olive green-gold mineral embedded in it called, appropriately, Olivine which is a magnesium-silicate.
When asteroids collide “small” (relative to the size of the original whole) particles break away and some, if caught in the earth’s gravitational field, are drawn towards us and fall to earth. It is believed that the “asteroid belt” was formed about 4,500 million years ago. The featured image, at the top of this blog, is an artist’s impression of an asteroid belt by NASA.
A small portion of meteorites come from the moon and indeed from Mars according to studies of rock composition in the samples from the Apollo lunar mission and the Martian samples from the Apollo Viking probe.
Many meteorites fall into the sea but many can be found all over the world, particularly in deserts and polar regions where they are easier to find. For the cosmologists and cosmochemists their chemical structure provides some insight into the history of the solar system.
Olivine in its purest form is what we call Peridot a semi-precious stone used in jewellery.
Charlotte
© Copyright Charlotte M Bailey 2013
