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hello and welcome to technically speaking where scientists and Engineers come together to chat about a common interests share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Laura and I'm joined by Ellie to talk about meteorites and what you do if you found one or something else that was equally interesting so early this uh idea for this episode came from you so what's your interest in this yeah so I've actually been talking about this quite a lot of work about what to do if
you would finally meteorite how to tell if the rock you found is a meteorite in the first place and then similarly uh things to do with other interesting things that you might find or out and about so what to do if you found gold or gemstones or any of that sort of thing and if you do find something can you keep it which is a whole other matter in and of itself oh intriguing So in theory I should know something about this because my undergraduate degree is an earth science with astronomy
sounds totally relevant right however it was nearly 20 years ago when I finished my degree remembering my most of what I was taught and if it's actually relevant to what you know I don't know we'll find out I reckon you you've got some knowledge stored in there somewhere in the back of that brain of yours hopefully see I did start off with so hang on meteorites there are asteroids there are other Heavenly Bodies what's the difference again I did have to remind myself I
definitely looked that up as well because I think they all get sort of used interchangeably but they do actually mean quite a lot of different things exactly so an asteroid is in outer space and that's it it doesn't come towards Earth it orbits the Sun a small rocky object a meteor is what happens when a small piece of that asteroid breaks off and then burns up entering Earth's atmosphere or then lands and becomes a meteorite does that make sense it does yes that
matches what I remember of meteorite being the thing that actually ends upon the Earth's surface and meteors I used to watch meteor showers quite a lot I used to actually go and camp out during well someone in August the really big one they come around periodically I feel like yeah there's one that happens I think the Pikachu is the August 13th every year and I always forget the name of it oh the looted nutrients something came without can't remember if every one
of our listeners can find us afterwards but yeah I've gone out and camped out into like the Peak District not a lot of lighting out there and waited until it's gotten dark which in August in the UK happens quite late especially when you're in the North like I am do you see them I've seen a few but pretty much every time I tried this it's been quite cloudy and I did get lucky one year where there was some breaks in the cloud and it was quite spectacular like I was like lying on my back
giggling like a school child on a hill on her own oh guys if you see Laura in the peaks in August just know that she's meteor watching yeah but yeah it is well worth making the effort because even if you don't see that many what you do is very impressive I do think it's really cool to like actively see more than stars like evidence of space like other things happening outside of our world that you can then see from your little Hill in the Peaks I think that's really cool
yeah and it's definitely one of more interesting things I've definitely seen one or two that have been so bright they cast a shadow that's cool yeah you wouldn't really expect it would you I've seen the um ISS from uh they had like a thing where it was like passing really close and you could if you were in the right place at the right time you could see it like going across which I thought was cool yes yeah I think I've seen that once or twice as well again they're
quite surprised wasn't expecting it oh you're up there are you okay ah but it does make me wonder so you've got the meteor showers which are a specific thing I think I'd read there normally like um they're from Comet Tales which is why they sort of come around once a year so we sort of pass through it at the same point around the Sun every year oh I suppose yeah that makes sense that they're like it's an especially comedy area technical term more likely then to
be comets that would like burn up and create meteorites for us in those like specific areas of space maybe yeah but I'd also read that they're quite small so they're actually likely to fall to Earth as a meteorite but you'll still see them burning up oh I see as they go through the atmosphere was what I'd read yeah I suppose it would have to be like quite big to survive going through the Earth's atmosphere and then land and then be still a rock yes and what I'd read I
looked around for this and it was in a way I was disappointed that I couldn't find a straightforward answer to this but I'm also not surprised that I couldn't find a straightforward answer so I did read on how stuff works that they said approximately depending on composition and how fast it was going in all sorts anything bigger than a marble um when it's in space has the potential that some of it might land on the earth's surface in a form that you could identify it and but then they also said
that dust will quite easily reach the Earth because it doesn't experience as much friction oh so there's just loads of space dust but none of the actual Little Big Stuff apparent loads comparatively yeah it's not like we're covered in space [Laughter] I was just imagining areas of like of like deserts somewhere somewhere it's just really just ice but it doesn't work like that apparently not but then again NASA said that um or seemed to infer that anything smaller than a car would burn up in the
atmosphere before it ever reached the Earth's surface I'm like oh which is it a car or a marble also that is a very subjective term because cars are all sorts of sizes like an American SUV surely that's going to get through or at least some part of that will get through but then if you're thinking like a mini maybe it's not quite quite big enough fair enough I guess I wasn't thinking about it I was terms I imagine giant hands just hurling Vehicles just seeing
how many you know like when you were a kid and you throw rocks in the water and you throw the biggest one to make the biggest splash that's what I'm imagining yeah I did wonder though if NASA meant that it would all break up so I don't know maybe fractions or some bits of it would so that there's more if you could have like a car sized thing it might break up into different bits and some more marble-sized things might get to earth whereas everything else would be
smaller than marbles I don't know yeah potentially or or if the whole thing would just burn up completely yeah it depends how it fractures right and again it also depends on make it like this like um the first reference I read House of work said it depends on what it's made of and how fast it's going so there are many variables so like I say no surprise that I find conflicting answers yes I can see that definitely but you said that you'd read quite a lot about
um meteorites falling to Earth and what they are and all that jazz so if you've got some fun facts that are better than my no what do you really tell this I love this for a fact right so there are meteorite detection groups and the qualities of a meteorite are determined by the meteorites which are the qualities that meteorites possess and then the meteorongs which I think hahaha is amazing so basically apparently there are three main types that iron meteorites the
Stony Iron meteorites and the Stony meteorites which you might have seen coming um and it's all to do with like the minerals the structure the chemical makeup of these like meteorites of the different kinds so some are extremely rare and can be super old like 4.5 billion years old which I think isn't earth like around that same age as well so like potentially even formed before the earth was formed which is pretty incredible uh so they mean they were formed elsewhere
in space way back when and have come to Earth more recently yes right I was having visions of the earth forming around them for a second and I thought that doesn't sound right I think yeah I think the first thing you said is more is more accurate that they were formed elsewhere the Earth got formed and then somewhere along the line they they land Donna um but they are very dense so if you picked up sort of a tennis ball sized normal Rock versus a tennis ball sized
meteorite it would be incredibly heavy for its size because they're so so super super dense okay I've picked up some quite large objects made of lead before in my job okay do they have any idea how they would compare to lead because they were fairly heavy objects you'd look at it and think that's easy to pick up and it was not I actually think that's a good point because it's the metallic iron within the meteorite that makes it dense so yeah it's all to do with the chemical
Elemental makeup so yeah I guess lead is heavier than it looks or denser than it is and which is the same with the metallic iron within the meteorite yeah so I guess yeah it's just me being really pedantic now it's like picking up a thing made of lead that people don't often do isn't that quite poisonous it was encased in something so it was sealed okay good but yes it is um and also there this isn't like totally yes or no but often because of all the metallic iron within the
meteorites they're often magnetic so you can have a little magnet be attracted to the meteorite which is quite a good way to tell if it's just a normal rock or you've actually found something quite funky ah fair enough so you can use a magnet and they should be heavier than your average Rock yes and then there's all sorts of like fun little uh telltale signs of like when the meteorite has traveled through the Earth's atmosphere the way that they have melted has like
caused like a Stony black they call it like an eggshell outer crust like a fusion crust so like the way that it's melted has you know formed this sort of melty melty crust over the top of the meteorite okay so they look kind of like iron balls you know like you'd see in a museum of like you know lead shot from way back when yeah yeah it's not that is not a bad comparison fair enough so it could be a ball from a musket from one of the walls it could be a meteorite yeah exactly
um there's like a few other different things there's something called the scratch test so if you scratch the rock along an unglazed ceramic surface there should be no streaks left behind and it's a meteorite but then if you get a streak like a black or a red Street they usually contain magnetite or hermonite which is like not typically found in meteors okay I wouldn't ever thought to do that yeah I think normally if I pick up a rock and scrape it along something
ceramic I wouldn't expect stuff to come off it necessarily I know it depends on the Rock right again it's that thing of being a kid and being like oh this rock can make that it's on another rock and you like write your initials or you know yeah that sort of thing but yeah I think this is quite interesting one because it's basically they're trying to determine the chemicals within the meteorite so if it's got these things then it's probably not but if it doesn't
then you might still be on the right track so is it worth knowing if you found him meteorite like are they valuable or do certain scientists really want to get hold of them so they can analyze them well so apparently I was looking into this and there's something that says per 50 cents American sense per gram which considering how dense and heavy I said they were could be quite a hefty amount of money and then depending on your specific meteorite rarer Stones can fetch a thousand dollars per gram
so yeah potentially you could you could be making making a little a little cash cow there for yourself but you wouldn't know until you get someone to analyze it yeah you definitely have to have it looked at to make sure and actually NASA they said don't send it to us they've had enough they've gotten fed up with people giving them meteorites yeah they're just not interested anymore because apparently they're not meteorite people they're like a focus is spacecraft and asteroids and protecting
people they don't they just don't want strange rocks or strange Rock pictures make sense they've got better things to do like the Aeronautics that's in their name yeah exactly they're administering the space they've got telescopes to Monitor and all sorts of things so they haven't got time to waste looking at your rock pictures but who would be interested in them like is there like University Research groups or museums that you could send them to and they'd value them
for you first off you have to check if you actually are allowed to keep it so in the US if you find a meteorite on land that you own you then own the meteorite but if you find it under Federal lands so like I guess national parks in America or that sort of thing it actually belongs to the Smithsonian Institute so they they might have dibs on your meteorite but they need to find out about it first so just don't tell anyone you can't make any money off just keep it under your hat
yeah so yeah do those tests try and figure out if it is or isn't or if it is just some lead shot and then decide if you want to give it up where you want to keep it for yourself yeah I don't know if I found one I'd probably want to keep it but I probably in the first place do you risk being like is this a meteorite only for someone to tell you that it's a musket ball from 1603 exactly and it sounds like they wouldn't necessarily look all that interesting yeah so you're not going to put it on
display I think that's the other thing that for a lay person they don't look that different to rocks but the um UCLA in London the meteorite collection said that they should contact like their local University or Natural History Museum and they might have people that will be able to provide actual scientific tests to see if it was a real meteorite also apparently the private firms as well and some places will test it and then buy it off you if you actually have found a good one Ah that's
handy so in the UK it's a bit more you can make some money off it and people will test it for you so it is worth telling someone in that case but just be careful where you found it because if you haven't found it on your own land then it might not necessarily belong to you so it worked out roughly is it likely that one would land in my back Garden fridges amazing using there's a scientific paper for years ago where they calculated about 17 000 meteorites land on the earth's
surface in a year in one year by the way that sounds like a lot to me I think that yeah but the earth's surface is quite big so that works out at about one every 30 000 square kilometers in a year does that also include the ocean as well because yeah yeah a lot of them probably are just sinking exactly so only with a third of those is actually going on see I thought of the paper I did say that more tend to fall around the equator are poles so I wonder if that is kind of cancel things
out a little bit but even then like just the UK that means you'd get about eight in the UK in one year my Gardens like this tiny tiny fraction of a fraction of the UK so chances of them falling on my land are very slim very slim there occasionally they fall in people's like on people's houses and stuff didn't they there's like reports of people being like oh I've got a giant hole in my shed roof yeah I wonder if anyone's tracked health and that happens because I reckon
it sounds like it's sort of like a one in a billion billionth of a chance but maybe there are some areas that for some reason meteorites tend to fall more often than others yeah there definitely are because I was looking at how like where would you go to even find one and there's like there's areas where they are more um common I suppose is the word and I'm trying to find the name of it but it's like most of the meteorites that fool that then get found oh yeah they're known as strewn Fields
or strike zones and the Gold Basin in Arizona has yielded thousands of meteorites since the first one was discovered in 1995 so that's yeah not even 30 years and thousands have been have been found wow someone needs to do the maths to figure out why that is yeah for some reason they said they like very Barren areas that meteorites are more likely to find places that don't have any like many other rocks and like deserty areas and it did actually say that quite a lot fell in
uh like the polls I think mainly the North Pole but like Barren spots like the Mojave Desert or the Great Plains have more more chance of finding one is that because it's undisturbed ground and some of these are really old rights they've been falling on Earth for ages billions of years so this is just places that we've not buried them accidentally by building houses and Roads yeah there must be something in that because this says the best hunting grounds are large
Barren expanses where meteorites tend to be black and therefore easy to spot so I guess if there's just less stuff around it's you know easier to find them and they said drier areas because it helps preserve the specimens if they are less altered by like you know years and years of rain and snow and all the rest of it okay so I guess that's two slightly different things finding one that fell to Earth at some time in the past and me thinking about with one fell into my
garden right now what would I do yeah that's true uh and you said that they they may or may not be precious depending on what's in them yes I mean how does that compare to like finding things that are of terrestrial Origins like gold and minerals and stuff like that what's better I don't know what's better I think if you want to make find something either a lot of one thing or something super rare and therefore valuable so there's some suggestion that black diamonds are formed uh in outer space
and then come to space in meteorites so if you were to find a black diamond that would be exceptionally rare and exceptionally valuable but equally very hard to find but you're more likely to find more gold if you like hit a vein of gold you could probably find a large amount and then you'd have more well probably not more money because black diamonds are incredibly valuable but it might be more reliable but do you on the right to that gold if you find it because I know I've been
looking to buy some like a few fields to be wild just because I can why not since microcultural land into a wildlife space Oh My Gosh definitely going into a whole different podcast episode here we must mention rewarding in every single one that's cool it's the future but I happen to come across this thing about minimal rights and I wouldn't necessarily own the rights to any gold that I found even though it would be on or under my own land because I wouldn't have the rights to it
yeah I think actually in the UK If you find gold or silver they actually belong to the royal family to the crown so yeah I don't think you will be able to keep it that just seems rude they had nothing to do with it I mean that is a great caveat isn't it to be like yes I am King and also if you find any gold it's mine it hasn't Charlie got enough money you've definitely got enough gold I've seen that Crown oh I said the black diamonds do you know what is in that
because I know that diamonds are just it's carbon and the atoms are in some particular Arrangement that makes it pretty because you get sort of you know all the atoms line up and you can cut it quite easily or you know hit it with a hammer and it fractures open and you've got these sort of um multi-faceted shiny faces yeah so these black diamonds are called carbonado they are 2.6 to 3.8 billion years old and this is interesting this might help with the meteorite search they've only
ever been found in Brazil and like Central African Republic but they think because they're so old this was like they came to Earth a long time ago when the Earth was like still connected as one supercontinent so that's why they're in those places because then obviously over time it's split but at one time it was all together but they are polycrystalline or aggregate Diamond material whatever that means not actually diamonds but they basically just contain carbon that's been
like smooshed it says contain amorphous carbon diamond and graphite which are all forms of carbon but it's the way that they are arranged they're like structure is different than like a regular white diamond okay so I would imagine that the reason it looks black is because the atoms aren't all arranged in the same way so you've got areas of opacity I can see what I could see that being true yeah and I guess it depends on how regularly they're spaced as well so they might sort of be in particular
regions and create a layer with diamonds either side and that layer might somehow be reflective in a particular way or absorb some of the light in a different way so if you're looking also at the money argument for finding meteorites and finding gems and all that sort of thing the uh one of the biggest black diamonds was sold for 3.16 million in February last year just to give you an idea of some of these the worst of some of these things cool so I have to say how big that was yes it
weighed 111 grams so not very big so chances of finding one of those and correctly identifying it if it's inside some gray ball of metal and sending it to the right person and having everything line up to be able to just magically have millions of pounds quite slim quite slim yeah quite slim but we can help but also then you need someone very rich that wants to buy it from you as well that is true but I imagine that's probably the easiest bit of it being like yeah look at my snazzy
Diamond who wants to buy it maybe maybe lots of people do media so you find this really rare thing get at whatever Institute that is verified that it's a really rare thing to sort of do a bit of a breath release hype around it make a couple of tick tocks you sold you're done exactly like those guys that did that drink was it Prime and people were like falling over themselves to get a bottle of it I can't believe that that has come up so many times at work of people being like but
why like is it even nice is it good is it just glorified Red Bull like I don't understand anything about that no but it's just the hype that was put around it isn't it it doesn't really matter what it was made of it was just it was made to be desirable yeah as soon as someone's got it you've got to have it yeah or so I feel like diamonds at least they do have some practical purposes yeah I can see why like diamonds at least have longevity as well yeah and you can use them like you get diamond
tip tools and all sorts certainly they're really hard so they have useful properties to them apparently this is also the thing about these carbonado diamonds that they are especially dense and it actually took three years to like polish and cut this diamond in into like a shiny diamond shape because otherwise they do just sort of look like rocks yeah I saw some images when I was doing some research of like lab growing diamonds before they cut them polished
and they look just kind of like lumps of glass that's the thing I would 100 be like oh that's a cool rock and then I just wouldn't that'd be it my thought I wouldn't be like oh yeah this is a 2.6 million year old diamond from outer space exactly and I spend quite a lot of time on the beaches around here like looking at the little Pebbles and things that wash up so I live next to Lake District so we get a whole different range of different rocks the whole different colors and bits of sea glass
and all sorts so I may have at some point found a diamond and not known about it put it back on the beach I don't think Cumbria is a hotbed for diamonds but who knows maybe it is maybe there isn't no one has realized you never know or though because I live next to a really old Seaport there might have been some Diamond smuggling at some point oh that's cool yeah there's a sunken ships somewhere with all this treasure in it and it occasionally washes a bit up on the beach they do say
that there is a lot of gold in the sea because of all the shipwrecks from like back in the day and people carrying like literal treasure yeah on shipwrecks that sank there's like loads of gold in the sea so yeah maybe there's loads of diamonds in the bottom of the Cumbria Rivers who knows I also found the sounds really dark now and instructable on how to make a diamond in a microwave oh my goodness we need to do it we need to do an experiment well the person that did
it had photos of it documented their entire process and said they took it to a jeweler a friend of theirs that could confirm what's in it using official techniques and they said well yes I mean it was absolutely tiny and it looked like nothing of interest at all they said it does have some diamond-like properties but it's not a very high quality and it wasn't really exciting to look at yeah I suppose you need like high carrots and Clarity and all the rest of it didn't you yeah and this is
like you know a piece of um graphite from a pencil you know it's like mechanical pencils you can get oh yeah and you can get like the rechargeable graphite things it was like one of those so it was quite thin anyway so how do they do it then they just use the temperature of the microwave they put a dab of oil on it and let it soak into the graphite to apparently concentrate the Heat and then set the microwave to the maximum power and maximum amount of time which is like an hour and a half or
something just going round and round and round for one like tiny bit of pencil but I think they put it right in the middle and they removed the rotating tray and I don't know why this is important but they put it in a like a ceramic Crucible so two coffee mugs upside down to form this little chamber I don't know how that would make a difference necessarily I mean I like the idea of it but maybe the execution could do with a little bit of work yeah but there you go
it is feasible to make a diamond at home but it's just not all that exciting yeah please someone try it and and tweet us and tell us that you've done it yeah I've got to say I didn't think it was worth my effort or the time or the power either yeah electricity is expensive I could run a microwave for an hour and a half no not just for the sake of it I mean you can grow diamonds in the lab grow I'm not sure that's the right term make diamonds the lab relatively easily if
you've got the right equipment it's uh just a very high temperature about five fifty thousand times higher than atmospheric pressure wow and about a thousand degrees C so if you've got a machine that can go up to that temperature and pressure yeah also probably quite expensive way to do it though yeah maybe we'll leave it to the professionals yeah yeah I'd also seen something in the news not seriously going back to what you're saying about finding gold about some
metal detectorists that found a cache or a horde and then they try to sell it on the black market and they got found out and you're not meant to do that as you just said you're meant to declare it you can't blame them for trying I mean if you thought you could get rich quick doing that then I think also there's a thing about like historical significance and importance like just finding a lump of gold is one thing but finding like gold coins from 1080 or something like
that is is making you know is like culturally relevant isn't it so you can't just profit from that and you have to give it to a museum or something yeah I think I can't run exactly what it was but I'm sure I read that if they'd gone through proper channels they would actually have gotten more money than attempting to sell it on like the black market or the dark web or wherever oh you heard it here first do things officially and you might get a cut of the cash
yeah unless it is definitely gold and it it's not of cultural significance and then it just goes to the king don't do that yeah that's true in which case probably just keep it and then subtly slide it to your mate no I'm not advocating for uh backyard dealings and gemstones and gold now it's a nice idea that going out to try and find something valuable people do go panning for gold in all sorts don't they yeah there's like official places as well where you can pan for
gold and if you do find it it's legally yours to keep like that's like the agreement of the the place that you go to like I've done it in Australia we went planning for gold we didn't find anything but it was quite a fun day yeah and then they have like tiny little gold things in the gift shop that you can keep that you can buy and keep pretend that you pretend you found it I like your cat making an appearance there was going whoa whoa I swear she has the loudest meow and she
likes to talk like there's nothing she's been fed she's got plenty to drink my partner's downstairs so she's got someone to interact with but she just loves to shout about different things yeah I want to know who you're talking to I was doing a podcast earlier and I've done like 99.9 of the whole thing and then out of nowhere she's sprang onto the laptop and I was like oh my God no I've got to save it I've got to save it and uh yeah I I hefted her off rather undignified but I was like I need to
protect the recording so she always knows how much she always picks her moment to appear all right oh actually my dog is now just walked in I feel like this might be signaling an end to the podcast episode but perhaps a demanding that we return to them yeah like it's evening what are you doing come play with me come into the garden and wait for that meteorite to fall amazing I think that probably is a good place to bring it to your clothes what's your cat's name sparkles sparkles and
smudge demands that we do something else now yeah we've been told in no uncertain terms to get off Zoom and go into the real world oh it's like saying I'm not a real person ah so it sounds like chances of finding a meteorite in the UK anyway are quite Slim So if you want to go looking properly go somewhere where there aren't a lot of people and you might find a historic one and you never know it might be worth something or there might be a new scientific discovery made like the
structure of these weird black diamonds yeah absolutely there are groups as well if you are genuinely interested in fighting meteorites there are forums and groups and all sorts of different pages that you can go on and and have a go ah there you go get um get on those forums and find out if you really do want to do it or just you know do what he didn't go to Australia and uh pretend to plan for goal I mean I real really pan for gold I just didn't I didn't find any but you
might you know you've got to keep trying yeah and you never know you might get rich it sounds like it's very slim chance but you never know exactly you've got to be in it to win it and I thought no I think that's it for this week so if you've enjoyed listening come and find us on social media and have a chat with us tell us what you liked tell us what we could improve if you prefer tell us if you made a diamond in your microwave oh yes please do because we can't afford
to apparently we would really like it actually if um if you enjoyed this episode if you give us a little bit of money on our coffee funds pay for a cup of coffee or tea or a beer whatever you text you fancy and keep the podcast going so until next time thanks for listening the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us
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