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Residents in rural Sask buzzing about meteor rocks and bidding war
SASKATOON — Residents in rural Saskatchewan near the Alberta boundary are buzzing with speculation 10 tonnes of meteorite rocks are scattered across their small patch of the Prairies.
And with a bidding war brewing between meteorite hunters in the United States, many expect the sparsely populated area could soon find itself in the middle of an astronomical circus.
“It could turn into quite a fiasco,” Mike Casper of Ithaca, N.Y., said Tuesday.
The private collector, who is also curator of the meteorite collection at Cornell University, said he has seen hundreds of rock hunters pull into towns in Arizona and Texas where meteors were spotted in the past few years.
On Thursday, a large fireball brightly lit up the night sky and was reportedly spotted by tens of thousands of people across all three Prairie provinces. Witnesses reported it was as bright as the sun and some heard sonic booms.
The fireball was as big as a desk, say experts, and meteors that size occur over Canada only once every five years.
Alan Hildebrand, a University of Calgary researcher, has since pinpointed an area of farm fields near Manitou Lake, where possibly hundreds of chunks from the meteor may be found.
Robert Haag of Tucson, Ariz., the self-declared “Indiana Jones of meteorite hunters”, earlier announced a $10,000 reward for the first one-kilogram chunk located.
“I will up that to $12,000 US,” Casper said. “When they find it and the smoke clears, somebody’s gonna phone me, cause they know they’re looking for a bidding war.”
He said he paid $225,000 for a rare meteorite in 1997. He owns hundreds of others.
“It’s just the romance of owning something that did not originate on this planet,” he said.
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Search is on for Meteor that lit sky over western Canada
MONTREAL (AFP) — Scientists and amateur astronomers have been combing the prairies in western Canada for a 10-ton meteorite that lit the sky and exploded with the force of 300 tons of dynamite, according to experts from the Canadian Space Agency.
The meteorite, seen on Thursday by thousands of people in a 700 kilometer (435-mile) radius, fell southeast of Lloydminster, near the border between Saskatchewan and Alberta provinces, astrophysicists Alan Hildebrand and Peter Brown said in a statement.
At the moment it entered the atmosphere, the asteroid fragment weighed approximately 10 tonnes, from an energy estimate derived from infrasound records, said Brown, professor of meteor physics at University of Western Ontario.
“The indicated energy is approximately one third of a kiloton of TNT,” he added.
Hundreds of fragments of the meteorite weighing more than 50 grams (1.76 ounces) were likely strewn over a wide area since its the speed of entry, some 14 kilometers (8.7 miles) per second, was well below the average 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) per second of most meteorites, said University of Calgary researcher Hildebrand.
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