Barwell
£350
The Robert Elliott Meteorite Collection
Auction: 18 August 2009 at 15:00 BST
Description
Polished fragment
Dimensions
11.7g, 2 x 2.2 x 1.6cm
Footnote
Barwell (Leicestershire, England, UK) L6 (stone) - fell 24th December 1965
Affectionately known as the 'Christmas Meteorite', the Barwell meteorite fell to Earth on the small English town of Barwell at 4:20pm on Christmas Eve 1965.
The huge aerial explosion and sonic boom shook the town and scared residents. Some fragments bounced off a car, one broke a house window and ended up in a plant pot (the owner unwittingly threw it away!). A larger piece put a sizeable crater (impact pit) in a resident's driveway. Another fragment penetrated a garage roof, pierced the bonnet of the parked car, and wedged itself alongside the engine block. Christmas carollers later reported that they had walked over fragments of the meteorite without recognising their significance.
Many pieces of the freshly fallen Barwell chondrite (together totalling the approximate size of a Christmas turkey!) were quickly recovered after they fell, meaning that most specimens have a very fresh and light coloured matrix with little staining. Not only is this one of the few, very rare, English witnessed falls, but is one of the small percentages of meteorites, which actually hit something man-made - a property that's cherished by meteorite collectors. This sizeable specimen of Barwell is one of the largest ever released to the private collecting market by a museum.
Provenance: University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)