Search This Blog

Saturday, May 18, 2019

King Tut Wore Ancient, Meteor-Blasted Yellow Glass


https://www.livescience.com/65503-glass-egypt-desert-meteorite-impact.html

King Tut Wore Ancient, Meteor-Blasted Yellow Glass


King Tut Wore Ancient, Meteor-Blasted Yellow Glass

King tut's pectoral contained pieces of glass formed by a meteorite impact.
Credit: Shutterstock

About 29 million years ago, the sands of the western Egyptian desert melted and created tiny pieces of canary yellow glass — some of which ended up decorating King Tut's pectoral (chest ornament).

This natural glass, found across thousands of square kilometers in western Egypt, is thought to have originated from one of two events: either a meteorite impact on the surface of Earth or an airburst, an explosion that happens when a space rock enters our planet's atmosphere. [Photos: Giant Spiral Grows Out of Egypt's Desert]

An ancient meteor impact melted sand into Libyan desert              glass.
An ancient meteor impact melted sand into Libyan desert glass.
Credit: Shutterstock

A new study suggests it's the former. The glass once contained pieces of a rare "shocked" mineral called reidite, which forms only during a meteorite impact, researchers from Australia and Austria reported May 2 in the journal Geology.

The heat created by either the meteorite impacts or an airburst would have been enough to liquefy the sand in the desert, creating the glass particles. But while airbursts create shock waves up in the air that can be thousands of pascals (a unit of pressure), asteroid impacts cause shock waves of billions of pascals on the ground, the researchers wrote. (In other words, meteorite impacts create shock waves that have millions of times more pressure than those created by airbursts.)

These ground-based shock waves, but not the airbursts, are strong enough to also create reidite.

In the new study, the researchers analyzed grains of the mineral zircon found in the glass; the scientists discovered that it contained evidence of the former presence of reidite.

In other words, its constituents are oriented in a way that indicates a once-present reidite transformed, at one point, to zircon. This provides the first "unequivocal" evidence that the glass was created by high-pressure shock waves, and thus from a meteorite impact, the researchers wrote in the study.

"Meteorite impacts are catastrophic events, but they are not common," co-author Aaron Cavosie, a senior research fellow at Curtin University in Australia, said in a statement. "Airbursts happen more frequently, but we now know not to expect a Libyan-desert glass-forming event in the near future, which is cause for some comfort."

Originally published on Live Science.

--   Sent from my Linux system.

10 comments:


  1. Your views are in accordance with my own for the most part.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is great content for your readers. Feel free to visit my website;

    ReplyDelete
  3. nk you for sharing great information to us Feel free to visit my website;

    ReplyDelete
  4. GREAT ARTICLE,THIS WHAT TOTALLY WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thank you for every other great article.

    ReplyDelete
  6. whoah this blog is wonderful i really like studying your posts.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Terrific work! This is the type of info that are meant to be shared across the web.

    ReplyDelete
  8. We absolutely love your blog and find nearly all of your post's to be precisely what I'm looking for.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I really enjoy your web’s topic.

    ReplyDelete