Schönenberg meteorite fall (1846)
| Schönenberg meteorite fall (1846) | |
|---|---|
| place | Schönenberg |
| Fall time | December 25, 1846, 2 p.m. |
| Coordinates | 48 ° 21 ′ 0 ″ N , 10 ° 24 ′ 0 ″ E |
| origin | Asteroid flora |
| Meteorite name | Schönenberg |
| collection | Hungarian Natural History Museum Budapest |
| authenticity | for sure |
The Schönenberg meteorite fall marks an impact event in Germany.
During the Christmas season in 1846 a meteorite fell in the Swabian town of Schönenberg in the Mindeltal valley . In Biberach, around 20 kilometers away, the windows rattled in several apartments. The roar resembled the tones of a kettledrum, but caused a noise "as if 20 drums were beating the general march".
Case reports
Teacher Christian Landbeck
“It had snowed heavily in the morning on December 25, 1846, the sky was cloudy and cloudy and the thermometer showed the freezing point. At 2:00 p.m., my family and me were caught by four slow, successive cannon-like explosions. I was just about to express my astonishment at the unusual time and place where this cannonade seemed to take place when it began again and followed one another at a rapid pace, so that one was involuntarily reminded of the din of a distant maneuver. There might have been several and twenty to thirty beats when the cannoning stopped and drumming began, which was very similar to the tones of an F timpani, but made a noise as if 20 drumsticks were beating the general march, so that my dogs almost torn from the chains and began to bark violently. While we were drumming we all hurried to the window, thinking we would have to expect the advance of the military or a gang of comedians; but then we noticed that the noise was coming from the air over my house and that it must have been due to either a thunderstorm or a meteor fall. The end of the whole apparition, which had lasted about 3 minutes, was formed by a long drawn rustling and clanging, which was comparable to the sound of distant trumpets. However, as a result of the violent air shaking, the cloud had at the same time developed a crack in the direction of the meteor orbit, through which the sun emerged and the remaining clouds dissolved. While we were uttering our suspicions against each other about the extremely strange natural phenomenon, a courier came from the village of Schönenberg, which was half an hour away, and brought me the news that in a garden on the eastern slope of the village, accompanied by the above-mentioned noise, there was a large one Stone drove out of the air into the earth and slipped deeper and deeper into it. Of course, I hurried to the site where half the community had already gathered and expressed their astonishment in the strangest suspicions. Many residents of Schönenberg, royal. Bavarian Burgau Regional Court, located on the mountain range between the rivers Kamel and Mindel, had heard the roar in the open over their heads and were so terrified that they awaited the day of judgment and, in their agony, pressed themselves into the deep snow; The landlady and a citizen, Leopold Weckherlin, saw a black ball the size of a fist whizzing over their heads, and the latter even noticed it falling below his house in Bartholomäus Emminger's grass garden, which happened with such violence that the frozen clay floor was two feet deep and the earth was thrown far and wide. Weckherlin immediately went to the hole in the ground and noticed a rather strong smell of sulfur, which had not completely disappeared when I arrived. The stone, after it had not been dug up without fear, still showed a somewhat increased temperature and must have fallen down rather warm. ... In the opinion of various ear-witnesses it is highly probable that in the upper parts of the local area, both in the Mindel and the camel valley, several more meteor stones have fallen, with the above-mentioned whirring and clinking accompanying the fall in various places Proximity was heard, although no other stone has yet been found. "
Karl Emil von Schäfhäutl
The respected Ingolstadt geologist Karl Emil von Schafhäutl (1803–1890) described the case in a similar way the following year. He was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , founder of the Geognostic Cabinet and professor of geology , mining and metallurgy . He also documents that the thunder was heard within a radius of 60 kilometers, for example in Kirchberg, Ulm , Ehingen, Biberach, and that the windows rattled in several apartments in Biberach.
Description by Otto Buchner
The stone was bought for 500 guilders (around 12,500 euros today) for the collection in Munich. Otto Buchner reported this in 1863. Buchner was a tireless meteorite hunter who had set himself the goal of listing all the meteorites known in the world at the time in a book. He wrote to museums, institutes and private individuals and received inventory lists from 59 public and 30 private collections with 185 meteorites from all over the world, including the Schönenberger:
“The surface is uneven and covered with black rind. The interior, which was opened up by small injuries at the most prominent corners during excavation, has a resemblance to a fine-grained dolomite with individual metal tinsel. […] The main mass is easy to crumble with your fingers and to grind to sand and acts on the magnetic needle. A fine-grained white component is distinguished, a yellowish and a greenish component. Sulphurous iron occurs in individual small granules, and shiny silver nickel iron is evenly sprinkled into fringed leaves. "
However, Buchner continues, nothing should be separated from it . In his eyes, this is highly regrettable, because: As long as the stone is not examined, cut through and analyzed more closely, it is a treasure that has only been discovered for science, not recovered. Buchner had to struggle with many difficulties in his work. Comparative studies are extremely difficult for him, because once the material is scattered in many collections without knowing where to look, but then the literature is even more scattered, so that it makes it very difficult to find all the sources and sometimes it is almost impossible to look up one or the other of them. What was worse for him was that there were also some deliberate or unintentional errors. Bricks, iron sows, even rhubarb roots eaten by rats have been described, mapped, and analyzed as meteorites.
Remnants of the Schönenberg meteorite
Most of the stone with an impressive 8 kilograms was destroyed in the war. It had been stored in the mineralogical collection, which, contrary to the advice of many participants, was not outsourced by the collection management at the time. In April 1944 it was destroyed in an air raid and most of the population destroyed. Today there is at least a small piece weighing 1.27 grams in the possession of the Munich State Collection. At 88 grams, Paris is home to the largest remaining fragment of the meteorite. Slightly smaller fragments have been preserved in Budapest (80 grams) and in Massachusetts , USA (54 grams). Many museums, including the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin and the Vatican , have gram samples of the meteorite.
See also
literature
- Bavarian State Office for the Environment : Out of this world. Bavaria's meteorite. Self-published, Augsburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-936385-92-2 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b C. Landbeck: Report on the falling of a meteor stone. In: Annual books of the Association for Patriotic Natural History in Würtemberg. Volume II, Stuttgart 1847, pp. 383-386.
- ↑ a b Bavarian State Office for the Environment: Not of this world. Bavaria's meteorite. 2012, pp. 48–51.
- ↑ a b c d e O. Bucher: The meteorites in collections. W. Engelmann, Leipzig 1863.