Starship Asterisk*

BDanielMayfield wrote:
Is an English translation of this article available?

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Felpais.com%2Felpais%2F2017%2F03%2F02%2Fciencia%2F1488454716_055094.html&edit-text=&act=url wrote:
The State loses the largest meteorite in Spain

A judge returns a rock from the space found in Colomera (Granada), 130 kilos, to the heiress of the man who gave it to the National Museum of Natural Sciences 80 years ago

Daniel Mediavilla : 3 MAR 2017 - 13:26 CET

<<Until very recently, visitors to the National Museum of Natural Sciences (MNCN) in Madrid could touch something similar to the center of the Earth. It was a piece of metal, half a meter high and more than 130 kilos of weight that had come from space. Its composition suggested that it had belonged to the nucleus of a disintegrated planet. The scientists saw in him a messenger with information from beyond the Solar System and a window to an unreachable region of the globe. Today, it has disappeared from public space and nobody, except its owner, knows precisely its whereabouts.

This peculiar object was a meteorite found in 1912 in the Granada town of Colomera. According to Javier Guinea, an MNCN researcher, the children who visited them could touch him and "check how the magnets were stuck to him". There, they explained to the kids how scientists know that the core of their world is made of iron even though no one has ever been there. "It was the most important meteorite in the collection, by size and weight. It is of a brutal and unbreakable density and had a great scientific history ", adds Aurelio Nieto, conservator of the collection of geology of the MNCN.

It is said that a century before, in Colomera, the young people also entertained themselves with that boulder found buried one meter deep, amid the debris of a house under construction. Placed in a corner of the town, it had become a challenge for the boys, who tried to raise that stone of implausible weight.

The Community of Madrid has not responded to requests to protect the meteorite as a cultural interest

Antonio Pedtes Vilches, the "practitioner and neighbor of Almuñécar", who, according to the story of the time, had to put it shortly after 1930 at the disposal of Julio Mateos, a student of the Faculty of Pharmacy of Granada. The young man got in touch with Jose Dorronsoro, professor of that faculty, to analyze small metallic pieces and to confirm its composition. The results, published in a scientific article in 1934 , Colomera Stone identified as a meteorite from space. With this scientific endorsement and Dorronsoro's mediation, Pontes ceded it to the MNCN, which now relies on the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), in 1935. The object passed into public hands through a contract in which it was read Ceded "as a deposit, but always at the disposal of its owner, who may withdraw it when it deems convenient.

Antonio never claimed it and, with the passage of time, the museum ended up considering the meteorite a part more of its collection. With this confidence, in 1967 he sent it to the University of California to cut a piece and analyze it. Nieto says that in those years, "NASA wanted to accumulate as much data as possible to program trips to the Moon" and that meteorite served that purpose. Part of those "slices" extracted by the University of California, which were exchanged for other meteorites, something common in this scientific field, ended up in the Museum of Natural History in New York, and part in private collections that, by a carambola, returned to Spain.

During the 60's, he was taken to the United States, where fragments were extracted to obtain useful information on the trip to the Moon

The trajectory of the meteorite changed in 2008. Then, the City council of Colomera wanted that the inhabitants of the town where the famous rock was located could see it of close. Those responsible for the MNCN offered the municipality of Granada all their cooperation and, they think now, sinned innocently. "We made mistakes in good faith," laments Guinea. When the meteorite was exposed, the name of Antonio Pontes, the practitioner who had given it to the museum, was put on display, and the document signed by the director of the period was included, where it was acknowledged that it was kept in storage and They would give it back whenever he wanted. Thereafter, a process began that the museum officials lived as an ordeal.

Shortly after the exhibition in Colomera, Amparo Pontes, Antonio's granddaughter, appeared at the MNCN in Madrid and spoke with Aurelio Nieto. "He told me that he had a very bad time during the Franco regime, that he wanted to compensate the name of his father ... We taught him that in the exhibition in the museum his father's contribution was collected and he was very surprised. I never saw her again, "he says.

The following contacts were with the CSIC, the body responsible for the museum, to which Pontes presented his suit. As the daughter of the owner of the meteorite and sole heiress, and since it had been cut and ceded to different entities and could no longer be returned in the state in which it was delivered, it claimed to the CSIC to be compensated for its value. The calculation of the price was made on the basis of the museum's own estimate of the insurance required to sign the organizers of exhibitions that borrowed the piece: 600,000 euros. With the current weight, after extracting fragments for research and exchange with other institutions, the gram came to 5.66 euros. After multiplying that figure by the original weight, 134,000 grams, Amparo claimed 758,440 euros for damages.

The CSIC, for its part, argued, inter alia, that the applicant "had not accredited the transmission of the meteorite since it was discovered by her grandfather in 1912", that it was not known "the existence of other possible heirs" and that " Object was not included in his father's will. " He also referred to the fact that six years after the meteorite was dispatched to the US in 1973, the CSIC was its owner for "extraordinary acquisitive prescription". In addition, he estimated that its market price would be 50,075 euros, which would have to subtract 69,102 euros of expenses since it was ceded for conservation, maintenance and security. Bridges, from the point of view of this institution, would be indebted to them.

The original owner of the meteorite never claimed it

After a trial and an appeal, on May 29, 2015, the judge ruled against the CSIC. The museum had to return to Pontes "all the existing pieces in its power of the called Meteor of Colomera" and, in addition, it had to indemnify it with 50,000 euros.

The sentence was a stick for those responsible for the museum that had guarded the piece for 80 years. Now Guinea is concerned that this case can become an example for other claims that want to take over a heritage, now available to the public, which is not well protected. Nieto acknowledges that since the ruling has "received two people who have come with similar claims, relatives of people who found meteorites." However, he believes that now things are better from the legal point of view and no longer sin of the legal innocence of the director who eight decades ago received the meteorite from Colomera.

On the lost rock, its whereabouts are not known and it is feared that it can be cut and sold, inside or outside Spain. As a last effort to protect the piece, although it is no longer exposed in the museum, its officials have tried to be recognized as a Cultural Interest (BIC). "This would mean that you can not cut it and sell it happily, that you have to allow access to the researchers and that, if you sell it, the state has the right to scrutiny, as it happens with works of art," says Nieto. The CSIC has already twice asked the Government, in July 2015 and at the end of last year, to protect the meteorite as BIC. For now, no response. The same has happened when this newspaper was interested in the status of the procedure.

After a journey of millions of kilometers away, probably from another solar system other than our own, a rock from the interior of a destroyed planet ended up in the courtyard of a house in Colomera (Granada). His journey did not end there and for decades he continued to travel. In one of those trips came to the US to be analyzed in an American university.

According to account Antonio Sánchez, lawyer and meteorite collector, a small fragment of that meteorite of finished in its power. "It's a 270-gram piece, transferred by Dr. Gary Huss, from Caltech, to the collection of the celebrated American mineralogist Jim Schwade and then to the American physician Jay Piatec," he explains. He acquired it by exchange with a chondrite [a type of rocky meteorite] oriented in shield next to another piece, a metallic meteorite found in Portugal, in Sao Julia de Moreira, "he concludes.>>

Its composition suggested that it had belonged to the nucleus of a disintegrated planet. The scientists saw in him a messenger with information from beyond the Solar System and a window to an unreachable region of the globe.
....
This peculiar object was a meteorite found in 1912 in the Granada town of Colomera. According to Javier Guinea, an MNCN researcher, the children who visited them could touch him and "check how the magnets were stuck to him". There, they explained to the kids how scientists know that the core of their world is made of iron even though no one has ever been there. "It was the most important meteorite in the collection, by size and weight. It is of a brutal and unbreakable density and had a great scientific history ", adds Aurelio Nieto, conservator of the collection of geology of the MNCN.
....
After a journey of millions of kilometers away, probably from another solar system other than our own, a rock from the interior of a destroyed planet ended up in the courtyard of a house in Colomera (Granada).

BDanielMayfield wrote: Is this "it came from beyond the solar system" claim just hype? Is it at all plausible?

BDanielMayfield wrote:

Its composition suggested that it had belonged to the nucleus of a disintegrated planet. The scientists saw in him a messenger with information from beyond the Solar System and a window to an unreachable region of the globe.
....
After a journey of millions of kilometers away, probably from another solar system other than our own, a rock from the interior of a destroyed planet ended up in the courtyard of a house in Colomera (Granada).

Is this "it came from beyond the solar system" claim just hype? Is it at all plausible? If it was, then it really would be the worlds most priceless meteorite. What is known about it? How long has it been since it fell? Is there a meteor crater in Spain that it may have caused?

Rothkko wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote: Is this "it came from beyond the solar system" claim just hype? Is it at all plausible?

that question caught my attention // me llamó la atención esta cuestión

neufer wrote:

BDanielMayfield wrote:
Is this "it came from beyond the solar system" claim just hype? Is it at all plausible? If it was, then it really would be the worlds most priceless meteorite. What is known about it? How long has it been since it fell? Is there a meteor crater in Spain that it may have caused?

I take: "information from beyond the Solar System and a window to an unreachable region of the globe" to be Quixotic poetic license. We can't even say for sure that any known comet probably comes from "from beyond the Solar System." The 130 km iron meteorite is much more likely to be a piece of the 130 mile wide iron asteroid 16 Psyche.

I'm guessing that someone was planting petunias in that Colomera courtyard about a century ago when they stumbled upon a meteorite that had landed tens of thousand of years ago or more.

neufer wrote: I'm guessing that someone was planting petunias in that Colomera...

Rothkko wrote:
"Found in 1912, it has been in Madrid since 1935."

BDanielMayfield wrote: Searching "Colomera Meteorite" brings up pages on this rock in lists of meteorites, but I haven't been able to find anything near as informative and interesting as the first story.
Bruce