Another meteorite hits Norway

Another meteorite hits Norway
A meteorite weighing around two kilos landed right in the yard outside Bjørn Herigstad's home in coastal Jæren, western Norway, over the weekend. It's the second meteorite-landing in Norway in a month, and experts are calling the incident sensational.
Bjørn Herigstad posed with the meteorite that landed near his house on Norway's west coast over the weekend.

PHOTO: KARL EMIL SØDERGREN/JÆRBLADET

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Stavanger Astronomy Society's web site (external link)
Bjørn Herigstad says he found the meteorite just outside his house at Orre, in the Jæren district just south of Stavanger in Rogaland County. When he went outside Sunday morning, he found a crater on his property, about 25 centimeters deep.

"I couldn't understand why there was such a hole and just started filling it in," Herigstad told local newspaper Jærbladet.

But then he found an unusual stone a few meters from the crater. "It's the oddest stone I've ever seen," he said.

Herigstad said he took it into his kitchen and washed it off, then weighed it. "You could see that it had melted and that it's burned on one side," he said. "What if it had hit our house? It would have gone right through the roof. I wonder whether our insurance would have covered it."

Per Amund Amundsen of the Stavanger Astronomy Society says that meteorites land on Norway as often as every month, but most are never found.

"This is a bit of a sensation," said Amundsen, who's also a professor at the University in Stavanger. "It's not unusual that a meteorite of this size would have created such a hole. This is incredibly exciting."

Astronomers were also excited last month when residents of northern Norway saw a meteorite streak through the light summer sky before it hit the ground east of Tromso. The University of Oslo's astro-physics department has a full report of the meteorite on its web site that's in Norwegian only, but it's possible to see a photo of that meteor before it hit.

Knut Jørgen Ødegaard, an astronomer at the University of Oslo, agreed that the meteor at Jæren over the weekend "is very special. What's sensational is that it fell so close to a house. That's extremely unusual."

Herigstad, meanwhile, isn't sure what he’ll do with the meteorite, which could be a valuable sales object. A quick check on the Internet revealed prices as high as NOK 700,000 (more than USD 100,000).

"We had just been wondering whether a cabin we're building is getting too expense, and then this falls out of the sky," he said with a laugh.

[link to www.aftenposten.no]