Kinda neat, but this piece bothers me: "...may be the first documented example of an extinct asteroid..." Huh? That statement bugs me because it's editorializing that doesn't belong in a scientific document. You can't correlate meteorite materials found on earth to absorption line signatures from the asteroid belt, and you jump to the conclusion the asteroids don't exist anymore?
Come on....it's a big damn sky that we know very little about. We found out in the last year (and reported 2 days ago) that we have had a 40-100m chunk of rock orbiting earth for a century or longer. It's just as likely you have no clue where your one sample came from, and you need to figure that out vs saying there are none left in the universe.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2016/160614/ncomms11851/pdf/ncomms11851.pdf
Of note though, I gave a flippant response to GRenee about her limestone in IL....maybe digging through limestone does have some benefits. Meteorites certainly sell for more than gold!
Dear Birger Schmitz, Qing-zhu Yin, Matthew Sanborn, Mario Tassinari, Caroline Caplan and Gary Huss:
Your contributions to meteorite research are greatly appreciated. Congratulations on such an important discovery.
Sincerely,
ASTROBLEME
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