An art work from 6 billion years ago

[Pierre Tavlitzki]

The fate of asteroids changed abruptly when the solar system came to settle in their empty environment, between 5.5 and 6 billion years ago. In this clash, objects of various shapes and sizes were formed and began to gravitate in the cosmos.

Some have come to lay on the blue planet, which is the third coming from the Sun (and which was not yet blue at the time this story begins). They are meteorites.

The one which is the subject of tonight was found near the settlement of Seymchan, Eastern Russia, 350 km north of the Okhotsk Sea. To come in direct line to the sale of Bonhams and Butterfields, simultaneously between San Francisco and Los Angeles on June 22, it would have been required to cross the Kamchatka and the Pacific Ocean. It fills the number 4428 in this sale of 600 lots entirely devoted to natural history materials and to some artefacts carved from them by our peers.

It is a slice of iron of almost regular shape, about 60 cm square and 2 cm thick, with the characteristics of having some original, ie unbroken, edges. It is polished like a mirror on one of its sides, and has on the other side a crystalline structure resulting from an acid etching. Such formation of crystals (Widmanstatten pattern) allows to state the extra-terrestrial origin of the object.

For buying this masterpiece of a time before Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor, 65 K$ are needed.

[Pierre Tavlitzki]

I had until now no benchmark price of meteorites, now I have one: the meteorite described above is not worth 65 K$, since it has not been sold.

[Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa]

I read with interest all these posted in the Sciences & techniques section. As I am from the field of science, they interest me a lot. Keep posting them.
Krishna