Could missing piece of meteorite be propping an old shed door open?
Scientist searching for fragment of rock which hit Ireland 200 years ago
THE scientist in charge of the largest piece of a meteorite ever to land in Ireland or Britain has appealed for help in finding the second-largest piece – which ‘could be propping open a shed door’ somewhere.
The ‘world famous’ Brasky Mass is a 27kg chunk of a 4.5-billionyear-old meteorite that crashed into earth in rural Co. Limerick more than 200 years ago.
But another piece of the meteorite, recorded at the time as weighing just under 11kg, is still unaccounted for today.
Dr Patrick Roycroft, a geologist and genealogist at the National Museum of Ireland where the Brasky Mass is kept, told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘It’s the secondlargest fragment ever to hit Britain or Ireland and it’s missing. We don’t know where it is.’
The ‘really fantastic, valuable fragment’ of space rock is ‘almost certainly still in private hands’, Dr Roycroft said, with the owner presumably unaware of its major significance.
‘Specialists all over the world would love to know where this is,’ he said. ‘They’ve been searching for it for decades and it’s never turned up.
‘It could be propping open a shed door; it could be in somebody’s basement; it could be in somebody’s rockery – it could be anywhere.’
While the search goes on for the missing chunk of the Limerick Meteorite, Dr Roycroft has been piecing together the story of how its big brother came into the possession of the National Museum in 1947 – as featured in a new RTÉ One series starting this evening called Ireland’s Hidden Treasure.
The fragmented meteorite, believed to be older than Earth, crashed into fields in Limerick at 9am on Friday, September 10,
1813, with each piece producing its own sonic boom as they raced towards the earth.
The meteorite had likely been travelling for billions of years after breaking off from a larger asteroid during a collision.
‘The locals who would have experienced this back in 1813 wouldn’t have known what the hell
was going on,’ Dr Roycroft said. ‘They would have been absolutely bewildered, gobsmacked, astonished at this, and definitely wouldn’t have fully understood what had happened.’
Indeed, the science of meteorites was still in its infancy at the time, with most believing they were related to electricity and formed
within the Earth’s atmosphere – and certainly not in the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond.
A report in the
Limerick Chronicle newspaper the following day described ‘a most dreadful thunder heard in the direction of Patrickswell’.
‘The peels were very violent and continued for a considerable time and were accompanied by some awful appearances – large fragments of atmospheric stones,’ the report continued.
Another story in the Limerick Evening Post decried the suggestion that the rocks might have come from outer space as ‘monstrous absurdity’.
The biggest fragment landed on the estate of Christopher Tuthill in the townland of Briska Beg and remained in his home, Faha House, for decades.
It was later given to his granddaughter, who married and moved
‘The Vatican even has a few pieces of it’
away from Faha in 1859 to live with the Taylor family of Holly Park estate – where the Brasky Mass then stayed for 80 years.
The estate and its items were sold off at an auction in 1938, with the strange rock bought as part of a miscellaneous lot by a local farmer, John Collins.
It stayed on his mantelpiece for a decade, until a visitor from the Irish Land Commission spotted it and alerted the National Museum of Ireland.
‘The British Natural History Museum got a piece to analyse, and it was confirmed as the missing Brasky Mass – because for all intents and purposes it was missing,’ Dr Roycroft explained. ‘It was in private hands, so it wasn’t on display. It wasn’t in the museum. Nobody actually publicly knew where it was.’
Mr Collins sold the heavy fragment to the National Museum of Ireland in July 1947 for £100, where it has remained since and is now looked after by Dr Roycroft.
It is one of only eight meteorites to be recorded in Ireland and is ‘well known worldwide amongst meteorite specialists’.
‘There’s bits of it that have gone to museums all over the world. It’s everywhere. It’s in American museums, in European museums; of course it’s in a variety of British museums. The Vatican even has a few pieces of it.’