MOSCOW — A meteor that exploded over Russia's Ural Mountains and
sent fireballs blazing to Earth has set off a rush to find fragments of
the space rock which hunters hope could fetch thousands of dollars
apiece.
Friday's blast and the shock wave that followed shattered
windows, injured almost 1,200 people and caused about $33 million worth
of damage, said local authorities.
It also started a "meteorite
rush" around the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, 950 miles (1,500
kilometers) east of Moscow, where groups of people have started combing
through the snow and ice. One amateur space enthusiast estimated that
chunks could be worth anything up to 66,000 rubles ($2,200) per gram
— more than 40 times the current cost of gold.
"The price is hard to say yet . ... The fewer meteorites that are
recovered, the higher their price," said Dmitry Kachkalin, a member of
the Russian Society of Amateur Meteorite Lovers. Meteorites are parts
of a meteor that have fallen to Earth.
Scientists at the Urals
Federal University were the first to announce a significant find: 53
small, stony, black objects around Lake Chebarkul, near Chelyabinsk,
which tests confirmed were small meteorites. The fragments were only
0.5 to 1 centimeter (0.2 to 0.4 inches) across, but the scientists said
larger pieces may have crashed into the lake, where a crater in the
ice about 8 meters (26 feet) wide opened up after Friday's explosion.
"We
just completed tests, and confirm that the pieces of matter found by
our experts around Lake Chebarkul are really meteorites," Viktor
Grokhovsky, a scientist with the Urals Federal University and the
Russian Academy of Sciences, told the RIA news agency. "These are
classified as ordinary chondrites, or stony meteorites, with an iron
content of about 10 percent."
He did not say whether the fragments
had told his team anything about the origins of the meteor, which NASA
estimated was 55 feet (17 meters) across before entering Earth's
atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons.
Pieces
of a meteorite are seen in a Russian laboratory on Monday. Fifty-three
pieces have been brought for analysis to the Urals Federal University in
Yekaterinburg. The largest one is one centimeter (a half-inch) in
diameter, the smallest is about one millimeter.
The
main fireball streaked across the sky at a speed of about 30 kilometers
(19 miles) per second before crashing into the snowy wastes, according
to Roscosmos, Russia's space agency.
More than 20,000 people took
part in search and cleanup operations over the weekend in and around
Chelyabinsk, which is in the heart of a region packed with industrial
military plants. Many other people were in the area just hoping to find
a meteorite, after what was described by scientists as a
once-in-a-century event.
Residents of a village near Chelyabinsk
searched the snowy streets, collecting stones they hoped would prove to
be the real thing. But not all were ready to sell.
"I will keep
it. Why sell it? I didn't have a rich lifestyle before, so why start
now?" a woman in a pink woolen hat and winter jacket told state
television Rossiya-24 as she clutched a small black pebble.
The
Internet filled quickly with advertisements from eager hunters hoping
to sell what they said were meteorites — some for as little as 1,000
rubles ($33.18).
The authenticity of the items was hard to
ascertain. One seller of a large, silver-hued rock wrote in an
advertisement on the portal Avito.ru: "Selling an unusual rock. It may
be a piece of meteorite, it may be a bit of a UFO, it may be a piece of
a rocket!"
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