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Aubrite meteorite from asteroid 2024 BX1, captured at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin by Laura Kranich, a Freie Universität MSc student and member of the Arbeitskreis Meteore, who took part in the search and found this meteorite near the village of Ribbeck, Germany. Credit: SETI Institute
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Aubrite meteorite from asteroid 2024 BX1, photographed at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin by Laura Kranich, a Freie Universität MSc student and member of the Arbeitskreis Meteore, who took part in the search and found this meteorite near the village of Ribbeck, Germany. Credit: SETI Institute
An official classification now confirms what many suspected from simply observing the images of the peculiar meteorites that landed near Berlin on January 21, 2024. They belong to a rare group known as “aubrites.”
“They were devilishly difficult to find because, from a distance, they look like other rocks on Earth,” stated SETI Institute meteor astronomer Dr. Peter Jenniskens. “Close up, not so much.”
Jenniskens journeyed from San Francisco to Berlin to explore the fields just south of the village of Ribbeck with Museum für Naturkunde (MfN) researcher Dr. Lutz Hecht, leading a team of students and staff from the MfN, the Freie Universität Berlin, the Deutches zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt, and the Technische Universität Berlin in the days following the fall.
“Even with great guidance from meteor astronomers Drs. Pavel Spurný, Jiří Borovička and Lukáš Shrbený of the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, who calculated how the strong winds dispersed the meteorites, and predicted that these could be rare enstatite-rich meteorites based on the light emitted by the fireball, our search team initially struggled to spot them on the ground,” expressed Jenniskens.
Unlike other meteorites which have a thin layer of black glass from atmospheric heat, these meteorites feature a predominantly translucent glass crust.
“We only spotted the meteorites after a Polish team of meteorite hunters had identified the first find and could show us what to look for,” shared Jenniskens. “After that, our first finds were made quickly by Freie Universität students Dominik Dieter and Cara Weihe.”
The meteorites are fragments of the small asteroid 2024 BX1, first sighted with a telescope at Konkoly Observatory in Hungary by astronomer Dr. Krisztián Sárneczky, tracked and then projected to enter Earth’s atmosphere by NASA’s Scout and ESA’s Meerkat Asteroid Guard impact hazard assessment systems, with Davide Farnocchia of JPL/Caltech providing frequent trajectory updates, and ultimately causing a bright fireball that was observed and recorded. This was Jenniskens’ fourth managed recovery of such a small asteroid impact, following a 2008 impact in Sudan, a 2018 impact in Botswana, and a 2023 impact in France.
Today, Jenniskens’ colleagues at the Museum für Naturkunde officially reported that the initial examinations of one of these pieces with an electron beam microprobe confirm the typical mineralogy and chemical composition of an achondrite of the aubrite type. This result was submitted to the International Nomenclature Commission of the Meteoritical Society on February 2, 2024, for review and confirmation.
The name of the meteorite is derived from the village of Aubrés in France, where a similar meteorite fell on September 14, 1836. The museum possesses a fragment of that in the collection.
“Based on this evidence, we were able to make a rough classification relatively quickly,” said Dr. Ansgar Greshake, scientific head of the museum’s meteorite collection. “This underscores the tremendous importance of collections for research. So far, there is only material from eleven other observed falls of this type in meteorite collections worldwide.”
“Aubrites do not resemble what people generally envision meteorites to look like. Aubrites resemble more like a gray granite and primarily consist of the magnesium silicates enstatite and forsterite,” stated Christopher Hamann from the Museum für Naturkunde, who was involved in the initial classification and participated in the search. “It contains hardly any iron and the glassy crust, which is usually a good way to recognize meteorites, looks completely different than that of most other meteorites. Aubrites are therefore difficult to detect in the field.”
