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The Czech meteorite connection
Today’s front-page story on the meteorite hunt going on in northern McLennan County around West is one of the most enjoyable, albeit exhausting, stories I’ve gotten to do as a journalist. Plus, any excuse to go to the CzechStop for kolaches works for me. My heritage is Czech, even if I lost some consonants in my last name somewhere on the way.
There was so much information that I just couldn’t include in today’s piece. A lot of it would have been fun reading, too.
The most amazing thing I found searching online was this site, which is maintained by someone in Japan. Several of the meteorite hunters who are in the area, like Michael Farmer, post here or it gets picked up elsewhere and aggregated at this site.
How’s this for weird? This post about the two University of North Texas astronomers who found a couple of meteorites reports that they initially plotted landfall of the meteor in Fayetteville, Texas — my hometown! Fayetteville calls itself the cradle of Czech immigration because many Czech-Moravian immigrants landed in Galveston in the 1800s, and then moved to Fayetteville.
But these astronomers got lucky, stopping in at the “Czech Bakery” in West (I’m guessing that’s the Little Czech Bakery next door to CzechStop) and meeting someone who asked them if they were in West to check out the sonic boom that rattled his house.
So they were headed to one Czech farming community (pop. 261) and didn’t have to travel farther than another Czech farming community to find their rocks. Wait till I call mom!
And you have to read this story about “Hopper the Dog” in West, who found a meteorite and deposited it on his owner’s porch.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
One big correction I need to make, thanks to the learned Doug Dawn, who was terrific to work with on this story and is a fabulous explainer in this video. In the chart with the story about the classification of the meteorite, the L6 reference needs to be tweaked a bit. Where it’s written that the 6 means the meteoroid probably dates to the beginning of the universe, that’s too far back. Dawn says that it should say to the beginning of the creation of the solar system, so not quite as old. But what’s a couple of billion years among friends?
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