Meteoric values
INTERESTING and valuable collectibles don’t usually fall from the sky, except in the form of meteorites. The best of these can be very valuable indeed. Christie’s online meteorite auction Deep Impact: Martian, Lunar, and Other Rare Meteorites, which concluded on February 14, realised a total of US$725,750
(€595,304). The top lot was a Canyon Diablo meteorite. This incredible piece of art from outer space fetched
US$237,500 (€193,301). James Hyslop, Christie’s expert in Science and Natural History in London classifies meteorites in terms of size, science, source, and story. The Canyon Diablo ticked all the boxes. It was large (weighing 31.9 kg) and originated in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It also came from a meteorite that landed in the Arizona desert around 50,000 years ago, creating a crater a mile wide and 600 feet deep.
Irish meteorites are rare. In April 1969, astronomers tracked a fireball over England and Ireland. It landed near Belfast, where a chunk of it went through the roof of an unoccupied RUC station.
The next significant Irish meteorite didn’t land until November 1999. When the spectacular fireball exploded over Leighlinbridge, Co Carlow, many people thought that a bomb had gone off.
“The phones were hopping!” says David Moore, editor of Astronomy Ireland.
Once people had recovered from the shock, they went searching for it. The meteorite hunter and dealer Rob Elliot had advertised in The Carlow
People, offering a £20,000 reward.
Elliot, who lives in Scotland, was beginning to give up hope when he received an in- teresting parcel in mid-January 2000. “Opening thepackageto find one of the freshest, blackest meteorites that I’ve ever seen came as something as a surprise,” he says. The meteorite had been found by an elderly lady who had kept it to show her grandson over Christmas. She forgot to include a return address. Elliot tracked her down, through The Carlow People, and gave her the reward. “We saw it advertised on his website for 50 times the price of gold!” says Moore. This particular meteorite was valuable because it was the last meteorite of the millennium, and because it was Irish. Stray pieces of Mars do land on Earth as meteorites, but these are rare and valuable. He reckons that at least two meteorites land on this island every year. “The problem is that it’s mostly cloudy and people don’t see the flash,” he explains. “The Leighlinbridge meteorite was found on a road. If it had fallen a few metres to either side, it probably wouldn’t have been found at all.” If you do find a rock that you think is a meteorite, the procedure is to have it tested by a university or museum expert. Most of these will do so without a fee, in return for a sample if it turns out to be genuine. This is rare. Dr Ian Sanders of Trinity College Dublin’s geology department gets wannabe meteorites at least once a month. The vast majority are “meteor-wrongs”.
But collecting is an accessible hobby. There’s a small (three inches wide) iron meteorite (est €70 to €120), for example, in Matthews Auctioneers’ house clearance sale tomorrow and Sunday. It was collected at the Camo di Cielo crater field in Argentina in the 1960s. “It’s four billion years old! That’s oldest thing we’ve ever sold,” Damien Matthews says. As with all collectibles, its safest to buy from a respected dealer. See astronomy.ie, christies.com, and matthewsauctionrooms.com.