Ensisheim (meteorite)

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Remainder of the Ensisheim meteorite

The Ensisheim meteorite is one of the oldest documented meteorite falls in Europe , of which material is still available today.

At noon on November 7, 1492, a small body entered the earth's atmosphere . It flew across the sky with a loud thunder and trailed a trail of light behind it. The non-burned part of the meteoroid ( chondritic stone meteorite of type LL6) finally hit a wheat field near Ensisheim in Alsace .

Flyer from S. Brant:
The Thunderstone of Ensisheim

The event was observed by numerous eyewitnesses and caused a sensation. The impact crater itself was then only one meter deep. The observers arriving from the surrounding settlements scraped off the first parts as talismans immediately after the excavation until they were forbidden to do so. This initially left a weight of 127 kg ( then 260 pounds ). Sebastian Brant described in his leaflet "Der Donnerstein von Ensisheim", a kind of warning to Maximilian I , the meteor and its weight, which should have been more than 127 kg when it hit:

Since you have ten hundred jars
Uff sant Florentzen day is war
Ninety and two vmb midday
Geschach a gruesome clap of thunder
Dreyg zentner black fyel this stone
Hye jnn the field in front of Ensissheim

Palais de la Régence in Ensisheim , now a museum, houses the thunder stone

Albrecht Dürer stayed on November 7, 1492 in Basel, 40 km away. A few years later, in 1494 or around 1497, he painted an exploding celestial body on the back of his painting Penitent Hieronymus . Dürer also depicted a meteorite in his copper engraving Melencolia I from 1514. However, it is unlikely that he personally saw the meteorite fall from a distance in daylight around noon.

The Roman-German King Maximilian I since 1486 , at that time with his entourage on the way to France to get back from the French King Charles VIII. Anne de Bretagne , who was officially married by both of them, used the Fund presented to him in order to “hold judgment” over the thunder stone and to use the possible omen for his politics. He had the meteorite chained and hung in the parish church.

In the course of time, more and more pieces of the meteorite were knocked off, which are now in other museums and collections, e.g. B. in the Natural History Museum in Paris. The actual main piece of 55.75 kg can be viewed in the Museum Palais de la Régence (Regent's Palace ) in Ensisheim .

Web links

Commons : Ensisheim meteorite  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Dr. Otto Buchner: The fire meteors, especially the meteorites, viewed historically and scientifically . J. Ricker'sche Buchhandlung, Giessen 1859, ISBN 1-147-84312-0 , p. 34; Retrieved November 7, 2012
  2. ^ Harry Y. McSween, Jr. & Marvin E. Bennett: The Mineralogy of Ordinary Chondrites and Implications for Asteroid Spectrophotometry . In: Icarus : 1991. ISSN 0019-1035 , Vol. 90-1, pp. 107-116; Retrieved November 7, 2012  
  3. ↑ Harry Y. McSween, Jr .: Meteorites and Their Parent Planets . Cambridge University Press , Cambridge : 1999, ISBN 0-521-58751-4 , ISBN 0-521-58303-9 , 2nd edition, pp. 1f, accessed November 7, 2012
  4. ↑ Hartmut Hänsel: Bombs on peaceful citizens. John S. Lewis teaches about meteor shower as a thrill and proof of God . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 14, 1997, No. 238, p. L42; Retrieved November 8, 2012
  5. ^ Manfred Höfert: Freiburg's history in quotations. Maximilian I. - A patron of Freiburg . Manfred Höferts' private history site for Freiburg im Breisgau , accessed on November 8, 2012
  6. ↑ a b NZZ of December 24, 2004: Signs of Heaven; Albrecht Dürer and the fear of comets , accessed on December 30, 2012
  7. ↑ Penitent Saint Jerome