The Gerzeh bead (top) has nickel-rich areas, coloured blue on a virtual model (bottom), that indicate a meteoritic origin. OPEN UNIV./UNIV. MANCHESTER
Posted on 05/30/2013 8:32:09 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
A study in 1928 found that the iron in the beads had a high nickel content -- a signature of iron meteorites -- and led to the suggestion that it was of celestial origin. But scholars argued in the 1980s that accidental early smelting could have led to nickel-enriched iron, and a more recent analysis of oxidized material on the surface of the beads showed low nickel content...
To settle the argument, Diane Johnson, a meteorite scientist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, and her colleagues used scanning electron microscopy and computed tomography to analyse one of the beads, which they borrowed from the Manchester Museum.
Microscopy showed that the nickel content of this original metal was high -- as much as 30% -- suggesting that it did indeed come from a meteorite. Backing up this result, the team observed that the metal had a distinctive crystalline structure called a Widmanstätten pattern. This structure is found only in iron meteorites that cooled extremely slowly inside their parent asteroids as the Solar System was forming.
Using tomography, the researchers built up a three-dimensional model of the bead's internal structure, revealing that the ancient Egyptians had made it by hammering a fragment of iron from the meteorite into a thin plate, then bending it into a tube.
The first evidence for iron smelting in ancient Egypt appears in the archaeological record in the sixth century bc. Only a handful of iron artefacts have been discovered in the region from before then: all come from high-status graves such as that of the pharaoh Tutankhamun.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
The Gerzeh bead (top) has nickel-rich areas, coloured blue on a virtual model (bottom), that indicate a meteoritic origin. OPEN UNIV./UNIV. MANCHESTER
The first evidence for iron smelting in ancient Egypt appears in the archaeological record in the sixth century bc. Only a handful of iron artefacts have been discovered in the region from before then: all come from high-status graves such as that of the pharaoh Tutankhamun.Heh. One of *those* topics.
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BTTT.
So, would this new/old GGG ping message drive you to distraction? I'm just wondering, because it's been a while since an overhaul. I noticed yesterday that there's already a ping list with this starburst background (there's a website to generate these things).
To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.
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All Iron,(and everything else)originally came from space, and still is.
Umm.... Didn’t all Iron technically come from outer space?
News flash, Earth is in space, details at 11.
Until iron could be made from iron ore, almost all iron metal on Earth was meteoric in origin, so this finding is not very surprising. In damp areas, it would not last very long, for obvious reasons. In drier areas (i.e., deserts), longer. It was probably MUCH rarer than gold, hence, very valuable.
Hard to believe, only 175 years ago, aluminum metal was worth more than gold.
I don't know about an iron, but I know that there is a vacuum in space.
Interesting!
From the chapter titled "On the geographical Succcession of Organic Beings" (page 218) we have ...
"A trillion comets orbit the sun. The gravel that surrounds them appears, should it hit our atmosphere, as a shower of meteors. The Earth gains a ton in weight every hour from their dust. Two thousand asteroids big enough to destroy civilization orbit nearby."
They drop in once in a while, too. :’)
:’) There’s been quite a bit of denial in our history that the Earth gets struck from above, and there still is here and there. That’s as old as Aristotle, who declared that stones can’t fall from the sky. That said, the iron on Earth’s crust mostly belched up out of some volcano or other, I left the gist of the debate in the excerpt, there’s a little more at the original.
And, on topic:
You doin good bro- this is my favorite feature on FR.
.... and in this case, he’s CORRECT!!!
...hahahahaha...
Aristotle was brilliant in his ethics, but ... (from Darwin's Ghost) "Copernicus and Galileo put an end to the idea that space could be measured in human terms."
If that iron fell from space, that makes earth the ironing board, don’t it?
Thor’s Hammer was said to come from the heavens, maybe the Vikings worked iron meteorites to create it and other iron weapons..
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