Oh, I wanted to subscribe to "Alien World Chemistry".
protocolture 2 hours ago [-]
How did the Alien World Chemistry get from the New Jersey Home into the Meteorite.
ButlerianJihad 1 days ago [-]
The real jackpot here is how this large chunk happened to impact a home belonging to an astute and prepared individual:
He then immediately preserved and documented the entire scene using disposable gloves and aluminum foil to place the meteorite fragments in glass jars.
I can think of many diverse reactions to a meteor strike, but even NASA is singing the praises of this guy and his quick thinking.
ASalazarMX 5 hours ago [-]
I think I have a pair of disposable gloves somewhere, and maybe could manage to get several glass jars, but I have no idea what the aluminium foil is for, or how to preserve the samples with it.
If this had happened to me, I would probably use Ziplock bags in the best scenario.
andrewflnr 4 hours ago [-]
I'm told aluminum foil is pretty close to intrinsically sterile, at least fresh. The process of forming it kills all life and it's not hospitable to new colonizers.
lelanthran 21 hours ago [-]
> The real jackpot here is how this large chunk happened to impact a home belonging to an astute and prepared individual:
Maybe chunks hit many people, but you only hear about the ones who are prepped and ready.
ozim 18 hours ago [-]
I see a parody of preppers in there.
„Your bug out backpack is not enough, you need space bug out backpack”.
tsoukase 8 hours ago [-]
With the covered surface by a prepared observer being so small and the place of impact being independent and identically distributed over all earth, we can declare such an event a one in billion one.
duxup 11 hours ago [-]
I've seen enough sci-fi to know I shouldn't just grab the dang thing ...
alex1138 1 days ago [-]
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alex1138 1 days ago [-]
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scrollop 1 days ago [-]
"Dumb" is correct.
Hacknews is like an organism, and you have been subject to the immune system.
floren 1 days ago [-]
Next time, try a clever joke.
Cider9986 1 days ago [-]
Indeed
jimnotgym 23 hours ago [-]
Did someone pay him for the rare meteorite? At least enough to fix the roof?
Who should one contact if this happens?
crooked-v 21 hours ago [-]
In the US, if a meteorite lands on your property, it's yours and you can sell or donate it as you please. This homeowner probably made a decent amount on the sale, especially with the emphasis on immediate preservation.
herodoturtle 14 hours ago [-]
> In the US, if a meteorite lands on your property, it's yours and you can sell or donate it as you please.
Does this happen often in the US?
I mean often enough that folks happen to know the legality of it?
In which case I find it extremely frightening that one could be sitting on their porch, minding their own business, browsing HN, and then get unexpectedly head-shotted by a meteorite.
Apologies for the ambiguity, I was referring to the selling or donating of meteorites - and only because I've never heard of such a thing in my part of the world.
ck2 18 hours ago [-]
someone recently SOLD a t-rex skeleton for $50 MILLION (61% complete)
so you should be able to sell meteorites that land on your property
only thing you can't own/sell is NASA Moon Rocks
qup 14 hours ago [-]
And milk crates
"National dairy. All other use prohibited!"
fuzzfactor 16 hours ago [-]
>Who should one contact if this happens?
If you ever watched Hardcore Pawn it looks like they would buy just about anything for the right price :)
hammock 12 hours ago [-]
What if it’s moon rock from a meteorite? How would they know?
lagrange77 19 hours ago [-]
Everybody knows that. You contact NASA. Then a black helicopter will pick you up, bring you to an airbase and fly you straight to the white house, where you will be introduced to the actual truth, while a team of very excited scientists with biohazard suits praise and examine the artefact. If you're still sceptical, they will take you to a large hidden hangar in the middle of the desert and show you around.
reactordev 16 hours ago [-]
You forgot the part where Brent Spiner shows up and tells you they have one and asks if you want to meet it.
sph 16 hours ago [-]
I guess I'm not be reading the same type of science fiction.
You contact NASA because you found a meteorite with clear signs of alien life, a black helicopter will pick you up, you get put in a dark cell, interrogated, and then told to forget all about it or G-Men will disappear your family. You try to sell the news to mass media, but rumours start to spread about you. Your life work get discredited, you lose your job and family, end up wandering the streets in an alcohol daze muttering about aliens.
I guess it depends if you've drank the kool aid about the US government being the good guys, or not.
spiderfarmer 19 hours ago [-]
Can’t take any US action movie seriously anymore. Not because of plotlines like this, but because they portray the team at the white house as somewhat capable.
You have to suspend your disbelief harder at the 8 o’clock news nowadays.
lagrange77 19 hours ago [-]
Watch Don't look up, if you haven't yet, it's brilliant.
spiderfarmer 18 hours ago [-]
I did. It’s depressingly realistic.
18 hours ago [-]
Razengan 22 hours ago [-]
The Vogon hyperspace development council.
decimalenough 21 hours ago [-]
Now you just need to find their contact details. Beware the Leopard!
18 hours ago [-]
vee-kay 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
fractallyte 1 days ago [-]
"Our cameras in Northford, Connecticut, and Douglassville, Pennsylvania, as well as a doorbell camera in Wayne, New Jersey, captured the meteor, and from that we measured its trajectory... The path traced back to low in the asteroid belt."
I don't doubt it, but that's an astounding trajectory estimation...
defrost 1 days ago [-]
Desert Fireball Network, and less public precursor projects have been doing this for a while now:
> The dark flight trajectory of a meteoroid is significantly affected by the atmospheric winds, especially by the jet stream. As a result, the meteorite fall position can be shifted by up to several kilometers compared to a scenario with no winds.
That network is mostly interested in where it falls, not where it came from. A few degrees for finding an origin is a huge variation.
defrost 1 days ago [-]
Planetary scientists are motivated to physically examine freshly fallen near pristine samples, yes. They are also keenly interested in origins, intra or extra solar system, relationships to known showers et al.
The less public precursors were and still have an interest in both projected targets and sources.
anovikov 1 days ago [-]
This is absolutely trivial as long as any fixed ground objects are visible in a camera and does not at all require some sub-pixel precision.
onion2k 23 hours ago [-]
It's trivial to draw a line between some fixed points and extrapolate back to an origin if there's no external forces acting on the asteroid. But there is - planetary gravity, the moon, potentially the sun heating one side of it, atmospheric wind, weather, etc make a big difference. That makes it harder.
anovikov 22 hours ago [-]
That's basics of meteor observation. As long as camera didn't move, you can plot the track against the stars and time is known. Then with two tracks from different locations, orbit is determined.
lazide 22 hours ago [-]
Also, a typical consumer camera is going to struggle (even with the best analysis!) to have visual accuracy within even a few degrees of true (due to everything from high compression ratios in post processing to shitty optical properties in the actual camera) and that makes a probability cone that is pretty large.
Still better than nothing, though!
anovikov 20 hours ago [-]
building a WCS model (pixel XY <-> ray vectors) of a camera is a solved science. Of course you can never expect it to be rectangular.
lazide 16 hours ago [-]
No kidding, that is what I was referring too. Precision for a typical doorbell camera is going to be several minutes of angle at best, which is my point.
anovikov 16 hours ago [-]
Oh well several arcminutes is excellent. Yes this is best case.
accountrequired 19 hours ago [-]
its like we can explore the universe from our living room
amelius 18 hours ago [-]
It's like doorstep delivery, but faster and better.
andrewstuart 1 days ago [-]
Scene one of a Steven Spielberg movie.
dylan604 17 hours ago [-]
You'll know it's a Spielberg movie if there was a shot of clouds preceding the meteorite shot first.
If you follow disclosure, scene 1 occured a long, long time ago...
ur-whale 19 hours ago [-]
> Researchers found preserved bits from near the surface of the original asteroid where it experienced concentrated salty fluids
Are we sure the guy who picked it up didn't just wash it with some sort of detergent after it cooled off?
gus_massa 17 hours ago [-]
No, many of the the molecules are too unusual. More details:
The amino acids have a central C (Carbon) that is connected to 4 parts, a COOH (acid), a NH2 (amino) and H (Hydrogen) and a R (rest, that is a polite way to say whatever). [I'm ignoring some less usual cases.]
The 4 parts can be arengad in two ways, "L" and "D" that are mirrors of each other. Living things (and corpses) almost have only the "L" version. But in the meteorite they found a 50% and 50% mix of L and D that is a clear thing that they were made by chemical reactions instead of living thing.
Also, in living things (and corpses) the possible/usual R are like 30. The meteorite has a few of the usual ones, and also a few unusual ones that is another clear thing that they were made by chemical reactions instead of living thing.
Also, the R they found can be explained by the expected chemical reactions on a meteorite. I don't understand the details, but IIUC there is HCN (Cyanide) and in some conditions it likes to react with itself and make the stuff they found.
So unless the guy is a mad scientist making weird experiments in his attic that are not very useful to rule the word, it's probably a mix made in the meteorite by chemical reactions.
From what I understand about this story, the homeowner had the presence of mind to immediately attempt to preserve the meteorite, which is what made subsequent analysis possible.
Presumably other fragments landing outdoors with no one around taking similar steps to preserve them, even if they were to be recovered, would not be as valuable for study because of their exposure to the natural environment of Earth.
xingped 19 hours ago [-]
No? It's obvious the meaning is that most meteorites will never be found because they're tiny and no one witnesses where they land. If it hits a house you know where it landed.
chrisjj 16 hours ago [-]
Not tiny. This is specifically about the largest.
stronglikedan 15 hours ago [-]
The point stands regardless of size: it's not likely to be noticed unless it hits something that someone would pay attention to.
chrisjj 14 hours ago [-]
And that need not be just a house, I'd say.
thisisauserid 19 hours ago [-]
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fllkfsalkdsfds 16 hours ago [-]
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pcrh 21 hours ago [-]
Browsing that site, The SETI Institute appears to have expanded beyond its original goal of finding extraterrestrial intelligence into astrobiology and more. Perhaps the first attempts at detecting alien radio signals hoped too much?
I have little doubt that, given the infinite size of the universe, that extraterrestrial intelligence (of some sort) exists, the question is whether we will ever detect it... It perhaps even exists as close to us as Europa, should we attempt a landing there...
Enginerrrd 18 hours ago [-]
Detecting radio signals never made much sense to me.
Even a few light years away, it’s almost infeasible to build a radio transmitter that could be detected above the noise floor. The amount of energy you’d need would be absurdly wasteful.
msdz 17 hours ago [-]
Wasteful by whose standards?
If you’re an alien civilization with several dyson spheres, surely at some point you’d have sufficient energy/resources even for such a “hopeless” science-y project, right?
If this had happened to me, I would probably use Ziplock bags in the best scenario.
Maybe chunks hit many people, but you only hear about the ones who are prepped and ready.
„Your bug out backpack is not enough, you need space bug out backpack”.
Hacknews is like an organism, and you have been subject to the immune system.
Who should one contact if this happens?
Does this happen often in the US?
I mean often enough that folks happen to know the legality of it?
In which case I find it extremely frightening that one could be sitting on their porch, minding their own business, browsing HN, and then get unexpectedly head-shotted by a meteorite.
Not sure if we should count Tunguska, which killed at least three people.
so you should be able to sell meteorites that land on your property
only thing you can't own/sell is NASA Moon Rocks
"National dairy. All other use prohibited!"
If you ever watched Hardcore Pawn it looks like they would buy just about anything for the right price :)
You contact NASA because you found a meteorite with clear signs of alien life, a black helicopter will pick you up, you get put in a dark cell, interrogated, and then told to forget all about it or G-Men will disappear your family. You try to sell the news to mass media, but rumours start to spread about you. Your life work get discredited, you lose your job and family, end up wandering the streets in an alcohol daze muttering about aliens.
I guess it depends if you've drank the kool aid about the US government being the good guys, or not.
You have to suspend your disbelief harder at the 8 o’clock news nowadays.
I don't doubt it, but that's an astounding trajectory estimation...
* https://dfn.gfo.rocks/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Fireball_Network
* https://pawsey.org.au/researchers/desert-fireball-network-te...
> The dark flight trajectory of a meteoroid is significantly affected by the atmospheric winds, especially by the jet stream. As a result, the meteorite fall position can be shifted by up to several kilometers compared to a scenario with no winds.
That network is mostly interested in where it falls, not where it came from. A few degrees for finding an origin is a huge variation.
The less public precursors were and still have an interest in both projected targets and sources.
Still better than nothing, though!
Evolution (2001) (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251075/)
Both fun movies, in completely different ways!
Are we sure the guy who picked it up didn't just wash it with some sort of detergent after it cooled off?
The amino acids have a central C (Carbon) that is connected to 4 parts, a COOH (acid), a NH2 (amino) and H (Hydrogen) and a R (rest, that is a polite way to say whatever). [I'm ignoring some less usual cases.]
The 4 parts can be arengad in two ways, "L" and "D" that are mirrors of each other. Living things (and corpses) almost have only the "L" version. But in the meteorite they found a 50% and 50% mix of L and D that is a clear thing that they were made by chemical reactions instead of living thing.
Also, in living things (and corpses) the possible/usual R are like 30. The meteorite has a few of the usual ones, and also a few unusual ones that is another clear thing that they were made by chemical reactions instead of living thing.
Also, the R they found can be explained by the expected chemical reactions on a meteorite. I don't understand the details, but IIUC there is HCN (Cyanide) and in some conditions it likes to react with itself and make the stuff they found.
So unless the guy is a mad scientist making weird experiments in his attic that are not very useful to rule the word, it's probably a mix made in the meteorite by chemical reactions.
You lost me there.
Is recovery possible only if a house is hit??
Presumably other fragments landing outdoors with no one around taking similar steps to preserve them, even if they were to be recovered, would not be as valuable for study because of their exposure to the natural environment of Earth.
I have little doubt that, given the infinite size of the universe, that extraterrestrial intelligence (of some sort) exists, the question is whether we will ever detect it... It perhaps even exists as close to us as Europa, should we attempt a landing there...
Even a few light years away, it’s almost infeasible to build a radio transmitter that could be detected above the noise floor. The amount of energy you’d need would be absurdly wasteful.
If you’re an alien civilization with several dyson spheres, surely at some point you’d have sufficient energy/resources even for such a “hopeless” science-y project, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper
The landing plan was scrapped last year. :/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Lander