Earth bound

Meteorites are popular items to collect and fragments regularly come up for sale at auction. In Christie’s Natural History sale last autumn, a cube of the Muonionalusta meteorite made £18,750 against an estimate of £ 5,000 to £ 9,000. This was a connoisseur’s piece. The Muonionalusta struck earth around 800,000 years ago in the area that is now the Swedish/Finnish border – pieces were "rst discovered in 1906 in the northern Swedish county of Norrbotten. The meteorite was part of the iron core of a planetoid and exploded as it entered Earth’s atmosphere. Around 40 pieces are known to exist and this cube, cut from one of them, displays a fantastic pattern of iron-nickel minerals, kamacite and taenite. Another whopping fragment of the Muonionalusta, weighing 170kg and highly magnetic, is on open display at the Earth in Space gallery at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh (nms.ac.uk).