The Hypatia Stone

[James Kerman]

Research into the Hypatia stone has yielded some very interesting results including aluminium in pure metallic form.
 

Quote

In 2013, researchers announced that a pebble found in south-west Egypt, was definitely not from Earth. By 2015, other research teams had announced that the 'Hypatia' stone was not part of any known types of meteorite or comet, based on noble gas and nuclear probe analyses.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180109112437.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_(stone)

 

Edited January 10, 2018 by James Kerman
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[Findthepin1]

Är you a reditor

[James Kerman]

6 hours ago, Findthepin1 said:

Är you a reditor

 I'm not sure what that means, Mate.  If you mean am I a member of the reddit community the answer is no.

[YNM]

TBH there's no oxidation in space, so I'm still not so convinced of anything weird. Aluminum is pretty abundant on rocks, after all...

[Green Baron]

I was under the impression that the meteor is part of the picture with a lot of glass lying around in the desert, with the glass being attributed to the fringes/coma and the stone from the core of a comet like object.

But i may be wrong ...

Yeah, Aluminium isn't a big deal in meteorites. It's among the most abundant elements of earth's crust.

[kerbiloid]

Alumina is abundant, not pure aliminium.

Maybe in space there is no oxidation, but to become a meteorite the aluminium particles should first settle on an asteroid/comet-like body and become a sedimental rock.
Together with water, carbon dioxide and other oxygen-rich substances. And spend millions years in mixed form.

[Green Baron]

Here's the abstract of the paper (i don't have further access):

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016703717307962?via%3Dihub

Somewhere between cometary stuff and Fe/Ni meteorites. There is a single grain of metallic aluminium present. A little little for rattling the solar system :-)

 

Edited January 12, 2018 by Green Baron

[YNM]

6 hours ago, Green Baron said:

I was under the impression that the meteor is part of the picture with a lot of glass lying around in the desert, with the glass being attributed to the fringes/coma and the stone from the core of a comet like object.

But i may be wrong ...

What comes off wiki that ! Correlation is not necessarly causation nor necessarily not causation.

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Alumina is abundant, not pure aliminium.

Maybe in space there is no oxidation, but to become a meteorite the aluminium particles should first settle on an asteroid/comet-like body and become a sedimental rock.
Together with water, carbon dioxide and other oxygen-rich substances. And spend millions years in mixed form.

Aluminum is still pretty high in the list of oxidation, and maybe in some freak collision event there's enough to undo the oxidation.

[Green Baron]

30 minutes ago, YNM said:

What comes off wiki that ! Correlation is not necessarly causation nor necessarily not causation.

I do not understand what you want to tell me ?

30 minutes ago, YNM said:

Aluminum is still pretty high in the list of oxidation, and maybe in some freak collision event there's enough to undo the oxidation.

There might be simply not enough O nor Si to bind the Al.

The lack of Si is much more interesting than the single Al grain. Unfortunately there is no serious interpretation of the results yet, only "mysterious", "weird" and "strange" things that "rattle the solar system".

Since i haven't felt any rattling yet i will wait for the next analysis :-)

 

[kerbiloid]

44 minutes ago, YNM said:

Aluminum is still pretty high in the list of oxidation, and maybe in some freak collision event there's enough to undo the oxidation.

Maybe in a planet core, some traces of deoxidized aluminium. As it coexists with iron and nickel.

[Green Baron]

13 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Maybe in a planet core, some traces of deoxidized aluminium. As it coexists with iron and nickel.

In the iron/nickel core of a differentiated planet ?

[kerbiloid]

9 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

In the iron/nickel core of a differentiated planet ?

 

25 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

some traces

 

[PB666]

Population 3 star supernova created a seed that was not part of a star system which later accumulated silicon and other minerals as it passed through a nebula created by a population 2 star supernova. As it passed through the nebula the latent heat burned of volatiles at the center leaving concentrated carbon, a space later crushed by that accumulated on top.

 

[YNM]

2 hours ago, Green Baron said:

I do not understand what you want to tell me ?

Just because for the time being it looks "logical", you have no idea if it really is 'logical' or not.

2 hours ago, Green Baron said:

The lack of Si is much more interesting than the single Al grain. Unfortunately there is no serious interpretation of the results yet, only "mysterious", "weird" and "strange" things that "rattle the solar system".

Yeah, I guess the overall is what makes it interesting. Probably a really bad dust mite ?

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Maybe in a planet core, some traces of deoxidized aluminium. As it coexists with iron and nickel.

Maybe some of them got flung out again ? One doesn't know. It could be interstellar...

[bigcalm]

Native (unoxidised, i.e. pure elemental form) aluminium is known to occur on earth - I don't think you need space aliens or to make stuff up to explain this pebble.

[PB666]

4 hours ago, YNM said:

Just because for the time being it looks "logical", you have no idea if it really is 'logical' or not.

Yeah, I guess the overall is what makes it interesting. Probably a really bad dust mite ?

Maybe some of them got flung out again ? One doesn't know. It could be interstellar...

They assume that SI composed a shell and that hypatia stone was surrounded by a silicon shell, so the question is how did they get a layered meteor. The answer is that the core and the shell were derived from different cosmic sources.

[YNM]

2 hours ago, PB666 said:

They assume that SI composed a shell and that hypatia stone was surrounded by a silicon shell, so the question is how did they get a layered meteor. The answer is that the core and the shell were derived from different cosmic sources.

Yeah, it's just a really bad dust mite.

[kerbiloid]

Layered...

Hypatia is not a stone. It's a planet itself. Like Kerbin, but even smaller.
It has an iron core surrounded by a silicate mantle.
It arrived from a region of the Universe with extra-high gravitational constant where it had appeared.
We should check if there are traces of oceans and maybe even biolife,

[James Kerman]

10 hours ago, bigcalm said:

I don't think you need space aliens or to make stuff up to explain this pebble.

Extra terrestrial simply means it did not form on earth.  This was proved in 2013.

The two leading hypothesis (as I understand it) is that the Hypatia stone is either an interstellar traveler or part of the Oort cloud due to being older than our sun.  If the Oort cloud theory holds it means the outer solar system may be more heterogeneous than previously understood.  Maybe New Horizons might shed light on the issue when it flies by 2014 MU69 on new years day next year.

[PB666]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Layered...

Hypatia is not a stone. It's a planet itself. Like Kerbin, but even smaller.
It has an iron core surrounded by a silicate mantle.
It arrived from a region of the Universe with extra-high gravitational constant where it had appeared.
We should check if there are traces of oceans and maybe even biolife,

Sure that explains the Mercury sized crater in Egypt where it was found.

[Green Baron]

8 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

It has an iron core surrounded by a silicate mantle.

Nope. Si is missing. But there are diamonds, high pressure/high temp. modifications of carbon.

Quote

It arrived from a region of the Universe with extra-high gravitational constant where it had appeared.

Where is that region ? How high is that constant there ? What happened exactly there ? What does that imply ?

Quote

We should check if there are traces of oceans and maybe even biolife,

Nonsense.

 

I found two articles, the one above and another one on the Wikipedia page in the references, both published by Elsevier. I won't buy access there now. Both articles' abtracts are insofar contradictory as the first one attributes the stone to a cometary nucleus and the second states that the composition is atypical for a cometary fragment. Both articles are confident that the stone and the glass particles found in the Lybian desert probably stem from the same incident.

I personally have no problem with the comet scenario (solar system origin) until further notice :-)

Edited January 13, 2018 by Green Baron

[kerbiloid]

2 hours ago, Green Baron said:

Nonsense.

OK, let's omit the life search.

[KerikBalm]

On 1/13/2018 at 7:01 AM, kerbiloid said:

Layered...

Hypatia is not a stone. It's a planet itself. Like Kerbin, but even smaller.
It has an iron core surrounded by a silicate mantle.
It arrived from a region of the Universe with extra-high gravitational constant where it had appeared.
We should check if there are traces of oceans and maybe even biolife,

20 hours ago, PB666 said:

Sure that explains the Mercury sized crater in Egypt where it was found.

I'm not sure if Kerbiloid was joking, or what he was referring to. My guess is that maybe he thought the stone is a piece of a celestial body called "Hypatia" (similar to Martian Meteroites), instead of thinking that the entire celestial body hit Egypt... (

My guesses are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/238_Hypatia

- At  about150km across, its within an order of magnitude of the size of kerbin (as far as diameter). Its a large asteroid, but I don't think its internally differentiated, so I doubt it has an iron core.

or

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_Draconis_b

- But the exoplanet Hypatia, aka Iota Draconis B, is a "super-Jupiter", so its not smaller than Kerbin

So... yea... not sure what he's talking about

[kerbiloid]

30 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

I'm not sure if Kerbiloid was joking

kerbiloid was joking

[Green Baron]

To filter out the nebula of jokes, interpretations and speculations:

The stone is probably the fragment of a comet's core, shocked during atmospheric entry because it has high pressure/high temperature modifications of carbon. The glassy meteorites (high temperature modifications of Silicon) found in the same geographic area probably belong to the same thing but represent a different component.

 

Addition mine: we have a lot of meteorites stemming from single objects, enough for a classification. Comets otoh are more diverse in structure and composition and there are only very few remains on the surface of such incidents (Tunguska as a probably other candidate). So there really isn't much to say about it yet.

Edited January 14, 2018 by Green Baron