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HomeUK NewsFirst Meteorites in the UK for 30 years found in the Cotswolds

First Meteorites in the UK for 30 years found in the Cotswolds

The meteorites are the first to be found in the UK since 1991 and the first carbonaceous chondrite meteorites in Britain ever

The first pieces of meteorites that have been found in the UK for three decades have been discovered in a village within the Cotswolds.

Scientists have described the new find as “incredibly exciting” and have confirmed that the rocks that were found scattered around the town are pieces of a very rare type of meteorite, which is the first of its kind to have ever been found in the UK.

The discovery was made following a fireball meteor being seen shooting across the night sky in the UK, as well as parts of northern Europe on Sunday the 28th of February.

Experts have studied videos that were captured of this fireball and estimated that if meteorites had fallen down to earth, their likely landing spot would be an area just north of Cheltenham in Gloucestershire.

This comes after around 120 people reported seeing the burning ball of space rock in the skies; the meteor appeared to be visible across much of the UK. The meteor lit up the sky over the United Kingdom on Sunday night, wowing amateur stargazers who were lucky enough to be able to see the astral phenomenon.

Residents had been urged to check their gardens and neighbourhoods. Scientists had received a call from a local family who had heard a thud in the night on their front driveway, before having gone out to discover a pile of black, powdery rock.

Dr Ashley King, who is a fellow at the department of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum, was among the first people who travelled to recover it from its supposed landing location so that it could be carefully analysed and confirmed to be a meteorite.

“I’m absolutely stunned to be honest and it really hasn’t sunk in at all,” Dr King told Sky News.

“I always hoped that we would get maybe one meteorite fall in my lifetime that I’d have the opportunity to go and look for.

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She continued by saying:

“This is the first meteorite that’s been recovered in the UK for 30 years, so this is an incredibly rare event. And actually the type of meteorite that we’ve managed to get our hands on is a really rare type of meteorite as well so it’s doubly exciting for us.

“It’s what we call a carbonaceous chondrite type of meteorite. These are really interesting because they are pretty much the most pristine materials that we have available from space. They take us all the way back to 4.6 billion years ago in our solar system – they’re the materials that were there as our solar system was forming.”

There are approximately 65,000 known meteorites that have landed on earth, of which only 1,206 have been witnessed to be falling and of these only 51 were confirmed to be carbonaceous chondrites.

This is the first known carbonaceous chondrite that has been found within the UK.

This comes after humans have so far degraded or destroyed roughly two-thirds of the world’s cover of original tropical rainforest, new data has revealed. The loss of this rainforest cover is also a major contributor of emissions that contribute to climate-change, with the dense tropical forest vegetation of the Earth representing the largest living reservoir of carbon on the planet.

As more calls and photos for possible meteorite sightings were received from around Winchcombe, with teams of scientists travelling to the area to find out for themselves.

Almost all of these “space rocks” have been broken off from asteroids, and then go on to travel for many thousands of years through space before they are eventually captured, usually by the sun, but occasionally by earth. They travel through the atmosphere, sometimes , like the one that fell in Gloucestershire, producing a bright fireball before they crash to the ground.

The last time a meteorite had been discovered in the UK was in 1991, when one of the rocks fell into a garden in Glatton near Peterborough, while the owner of the home, Arthur Pettifor, was gardening.

Eve Cooper
Eve Cooper
I've been writing articles and stories for as long as I can remember and in the past few years I've had the fortune of turning that love & passion for writing into my job :)

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