Science

Judi Lynn

(160,527 posts) Fri May 17, 2019, 07:37 PM May 2019

This Yellow Egyptian Glass Was Forged by a Meteorite Impact 29 Million Years Ago

By Meghan Bartels 2 hours ago

King Tut's tomb included an artifact called a pectoral, which incorporated a piece of Libyan Desert Glass as the scarab beetle at its center.(Image: © Cris Bouroncle/AFP/Getty)

Visit the right patch of desert along the border of Libya and Egypt, and you could stumble on pieces of pale yellow glass, the traces of a meteorite impact that took place 29 million years ago.

That glass, one notable piece of which was used in jewelry found in King Tut's tomb, has long been argued to have celestial roots. It's also the subject of a new study, which finds that so-called Libyan Desert Glass was likely created by a meteorite impact, not by an airburst of a space rock. If the research holds up, it suggests that scientists studying the threat of asteroids colliding with Earth may not need to worry so much about the consequences on the ground of large space rocks exploding in the atmosphere.

"Both meteorite impacts and airbursts can cause melting," lead author Aaron Cavosie, a geologist at Curtin University in Australia, said in a statement. "However, only meteorite impacts create shock waves that form high-pressure minerals, so finding evidence of former reidite confirms it was created as the result of a meteorite impact."

They knew that whether the glassmaking space rock hit the ground or not, it was large. But Cavosie and his co-author wanted to pin down whether the culprit was an impact or an airburst. So they worked with seven pieces of the pale yellow glass, looking at them under a high-powered scanning microscope. That let the pair get a close-up look at zircon crystals within the glass, which develop slightly different structures depending on what happens to them over the millennia.

More:
https://www.space.com/yellow-egyptian-glass-made-by-meteorite-impact.html