Meteorite or Meteorwrong Options

[Woody]

Some odd finds,

A buddy asked me to help him identify some hefty rock samples he was finding. He said they were full of metal and kind of resembled what one might think of as being a meteorite. This intrigued me and I headed over to check out his finds. Upon viewing them I was 95% certain they were not meteorites and was about 75% certain they were slag of some sorts. However I could not give a definitive answer one way or the other and I could not rule out with 100% certainty they were not a naturally occurring rock. We went to the local creek where quickly we found several other specimens, again a suggestive indicator they were slag.
Often the easiest way to determine what an item is, is by proving what it is not. So I tried the Meteorite or Meteorwrong test. “Credit Utah’s Department of Natural Resources Geological Survey and other on-line resources”.
“Many different types of meteorites, this material would best fit the Stony-Iron type.”
1. Does the rock have a fusion crust? “Fusion Crust can be dark brown to fresh black, and glassy”. Answer- Yes, there are several areas that could be called fusion crust.
2. Is the rock magnetic? Iron meteorites strongly attract a magnet, stony meteorites have a slight attraction. Answer- Yes magnetic.
3. Does the rock have native iron? Native iron is shiny metal bright and looks like untarnished silver when it is exposed. Native iron is extremely rare in natural earth rocks. Answer- Yes there is metal showing and if I had to describe it I would use the words, “looks like Silver”.
4. Does the rock feel heavy compared to other rocks about the same size? Stony meteorites usually have a density from 3 to 4 times the density of fresh water. Answer- Yes it is much heavier than water.
5. Does the rock pass the window test. Cut a small window to see inside. Meteorites are tough, so you may need some elbow grease and lots of patience here! Wipe off the dust from the ground-off area and look inside the rock. A plain and featureless texture suggests that it's just another Earthly meteor-wrong, but if you can see small, bright flakes of shiny metal mixed within the stone, it probably is a meteorite. Answer- yes I see three metallic flakes in the small window I made.
6. Does your rock have bubble holes (vesicles)? Most meteorites don't have vesicles. Answer- Yes there is some holes in the material.
7. Does the rock have a streak? Test for streak by rubbing the rock on unglazed porcelain such as the back of a tile. If it leaves a streak, it probably isn't a meteorite. Answer- Well kind of, some of it will and some of it will not.
So two of the seven tests fail, there is bubbles and it will leave a streak, again probably not extra-terrestrial. Had me worried there for a couple of minutes. They are probably some sort of high grade slag. A by-product of the early mining days here in Colorado Springs. I can’t say why they have iron and metal showing but maybe the process used in those days were not as efficient as one might think. So sorry Chris B, I don’t believe they are meteorites but it is possible they could contain high grade ore of some sort.

All in all we found around 10 items. Some were about the size of a small microwave and too heavy to carry. As I cut into the material I was surprised to see the characteristics. There was little to no granular structure and it could be describes as being kind of resinous. It would not cut easy with a dermal cutting wheel. It kind of “chunked” off like it was brittle but it was not. Not what a person would think of as being slag.

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[Snowball Solar S...]

It's taken more than 6 years of stumbling around and a paradigm shift in geology and solar-system mechanics to gradually spiral in on my current understanding, and no, it can't possibly be industrial slag with the size of the metallic-iron inclusions which preclude its cooling from a molten state on the surface of a high-gravity planet.

Mass spec analysis shows siderophile-element depletion (low nickel, no iridium down to 2 ppb) which is the exact opposite of differentiated asteroid and undifferentiated chondrite meteorites in this particular type of 'meteorwrong'.

Believe it or not, here's my understanding:

Our former brown-dwarf Companion spiraled-in and merged 542 million years ago in an explosion that, kicked off the Cambrian Explosion of life and ushered in the Phanerozoic Eon, perhaps seeding icy planetesimals, moons and planets with brown-dwarf panspermia, including, perhaps, (most) all the kingdoms and phyla which rapidly grew in size and differentiated on lower-gravity bodies with salt-water oceans and rocky cores. And the asymmetrical spiral-in merger gave our Companion escape velocity from the Sun, but its effects may still be seen in the similar argument of perihelion of extended scattered disk (ESD) objects like Sedna and 2012 VP113 and the former synchronous orbit of Venus whose rotation became slightly retrograde after the loss of the centrifugal force of the Sun around our former solar system barycenter (the conservation of energy and angular momentum thing).

Planets and brown dwarfs may have iron cores which sequester their siderophile elements. In a binary spiral-in merger, core material may escape in polar jets, but polar jets have less energy than the more vigorous equatorial explosion, so siderophile elements were largely confined behind the Companion's gravitational force field, known as its Roche sphere. The mantle material (which contained considerable iron) escaped the Companion's Roche sphere to be captured by the Sun to form a secondary debris disk which may or may not have condensed planetesimals, but apparently coated trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) with highly chemically reduced debris-ring dust.

Violent chemical reactions between highly-chemically-reduced debris dust and highly-oxidized TNOs frequently reached the melting point, forming pillow lava containing metallic-iron inclusions which I call 'TNO-crust', and indeed some TNO-crust has one smooth, curved outer surface, with the other surfaces being fractured.

Continental tectonic plates:
The basement rock of Earth's tectonic plates is composed of aqueously-differentiated planetesimal cores delivered in extinction event impacts. The central swath of the United States was already on Earth prior to the 1250-980 Ma Grenville orogeny, but the Appalachian dwarf planet and the North American cordillera dwarf planet were still growing by hybrid accretion of smaller planetesimals in the Kuiper-belt/scattered-disc where they became coated by the debris disk and incorporated TNO-crust into Cambrian rock formations, typically carbonate rock formations (limestone, marble and dolostone) which often forms the 'frosting' on top of aqueously-differentiated planetesimal cores.

The Appalachian dwarf planet splashed down at around 443.4 Ma causing the Ordovician–Silurian extinction event, and the North American cordillera dwarf planet splashed down at 66 Ma, causing the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. (The Chicxulub crater was a vastly-smaller secondary hit around the same time.)

Extraordinary disruptions of the Oort cloud et al. are due to intermittent close encounters with disk-crossing halo orbits of invisible, cold dark matter (CDM) gravitationally-bound (Bok) globules, composed of 10s to a few 100s of solar masses of hydrogen and helium, with sizes ranging from 1/2 to 1 light year across. Bok globules of the halos have their (luminous) stellar metallicity condensed (sequestered) into icy chondrules, such that the gaseous molecular hydrogen and helium is virtually invisible; however, Bok globules can be trapped by giant molecular clouds in the warmer disk plane where the most volatile components of the icy chondrules sublime, rendering them opaque and thus visible, and gaseous stellar metallicity reduces the speed of sound, promoting Jeans instability, forming stars.

There's enough TNO-crust on Earth alone to build the Great Wall of China, and since there's monetary value to consider, perhaps you will be good enough to say where you found the material, which I suspect to have eroded out of carbonate rock of Cambrian or Ordovician age, somewhere in the Appalachians.

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