Cantonment man finds rare meteorite after fireball

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4 days ago

It was the darkened morning hours of July 6 when Christian Varady saw the fireball falling from the sky, a momentary streak of fiery light that appeared above his Cantonment home without a sound.
"To me it seemed about this big," Varady said, positioning his hands as if holding an invisible basketball. "It was green and yellowish and then changed to blue and yellowish. It seemed like it lasted about five seconds, but it was probably just two seconds or so."
He knew it landed close by. The streak seemed to hit near a well-manicured yard across the street, just a house down.
When daylight came, Varady took his dog for a walk and thought he might do a little searching for evidence of what he saw hours earlier. He talked to the neighbor with the lush, green lawn and asked permission to search in his yard near the street. The man said sure, and Varady looked and soon found a pock mark in the grass, a small area of disturbance just a few inches across and a few inches deep.
Inside, was a small rock-sized, rock-shaped something. He wasn't sure what the small piece was, but he had a guess.
It was a meteorite.
He searched around online hoping to find someone to help him confirm what he found, and everything led him to Wayne Wooten, the noted Pensacola astronomer and longtime astronomy professor at Pensacola State College with a doctorate degree in astronomy from the University of Florida.
The two met at a Whataburger and Wooten observed the small piece.
His take?
"It's a meteorite," Wooten said on a recent visit to Varady's home, where he brought out his own kit of collected meteorites to compare with the new find. "I don't know anything else it could be."
Of course, Varady would have to have the space rock chemically analyzed to make a 100% confirmation, but Wooten seems convinced, already matching the rock's probable makeup, which he estimates to be about 10% iron along with a mixture of silicate stone, with another meteorite from Northwest Africa found in the early 2000s.
"We have something really cool here," Wooten said as he examined Varady's find. "Very rare."
That's because, truly, it wasn't a "find." It was a "fall."
In meteoritics − the study of meteors and meteorites − a "find" is fairly common and involves someone just finding a meteorite.
A "fall" is much rarer and occurs when someone spots a falling meteorite, then finds it.
According to the Meteoritical Bulletin Database, less than 500 "falls" have been recorded worldwide since 1950.
Finds happen when folks discover meteorites that could have been on earth for thousands of years, while falls are always fresh meteorites. (A meteor is the falling space object, while a meteorite is a piece that actually reaches earth without burning up from the heat generated when entering the Earth's atmosphere.)
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Wooten guesses that Varady's meteorite survived because it was traveling relatively slow and because of its small size − remember that he didn't hear a sonic boom.
"It's a good match for a chondrite meteorite, which is the most common," Wooten said, while watching Varady pick up his meteorite with a small magnet. "This one is very weakly magnetic. If he sneezes, it falls. It's probably 10% iron at most."
The meteorites origin?
"It's a chip off the old block," said Wooten, who is the Facebook page moderator for the Escambia Amateur Astronomers Association. "It's from a stony asteroid."
Wooten said it came from an asteroid in the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter, where the large objects are frequently colliding, sending off pieces, many which are "swallowed up by Jupiter" or might even be burned up by the sun. This one got into a near-Earth orbit and could have been circling the planet for hundreds or thousands of years before falling in Cantonment. (Wooten said there are reports that it might have been witnessed as far away as Gulf Shores, Alabama.)
"You saw it coming and you picked it up," Wooten said to Varady, who moved with his family to Cantonment after he lost everything during Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago. "It's one in a million for that to happen. It's just so rare."
Though thousands of meteorites hit the Earth each year, most hit oceans or uninhabited forest areas and are not located. In fact, there is a heavily wooded area surrounding Varady's Cantonment subdivision.
One of the most celebrated meteorite finds in Northwest Florida came in 1983 when treasure hunters using metal detectors found a bowling ball-sized meteorite in Grayton Beach, which is still one of the largest meteorites found in the Southeastern United States.
But that was a "find" and not the rare "fall" discovery.
"That's what makes Christian's so unique,'' Wooten said. "He saw that sucker coming in."
Varady now hopes that some lab will take interest in his find and conduct official scientific testing.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Meteorite found in Cantonment after man watches it fall from sky