The bolide that fell in Qinghai weighed 430 tons! Why are meteorites valuable? 1 gram once sold for nearly 100,000 yuan

I believe that many people still have fresh memories of the bolide crash in Yushu, Qinghai Province in the early morning of December 23 last year. Videos and pictures of the "fireball" and the instant darkness turned into day were circulated on major platforms and were even posted on the Internet for a while. After appearing on the popular list, people who didn't know what was going on thought that the Titans and Decepticons were visiting the Earth or that spaceships from other planets landed on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to take refuge.

After the Qinghai bolide fell, the Qinghai Seismic Network quickly measured the precise geographical coordinates of the bolide's "epicenter" based on seismic waves, which were 36.32 degrees north latitude and 96.59 degrees east longitude.

In response to the meteorite crash in Yushu, Qinghai, researchers such as Li Mingtao, Zhou Binghong, and Gong Zizheng from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently conducted scientific analysis and initially determined that the bolide was a bolide with a diameter of about 6.5 meters. , an Apollo-type near-Earth asteroid weighing about 430 tons, is a rare large-mass bolide crash event on Earth in recent decades.

With such a large alien object falling to the earth and not too far from home, many people must be itching to take the risk of picking up meteorites. Is it worth it?

From the perspective of longitude and latitude, it is roughly south of the eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in my country, bordering the main plateau to the north and the Hengduan Mountains to the south. It is a region with criss-crossing mountains, complex topography and geological environment, low temperature, and changeable climate. It is a high-altitude uninhabited area where wolves and cheetahs occasionally roam. It is very dangerous to search for meteorites in such inaccessible places where wild beasts roam. Therefore, I advise everyone to give up this idea and not to blindly take risks to search for meteorites, because it is really difficult to pick up meteorites. Otherwise, why have there been no reports of meteorites picked up after so many days?

Moreover, bolides are larger meteoroids that enter the upper atmosphere. Due to the thin air, they enter the lower dense atmosphere before they can burn out. They rub violently with the atmosphere at extremely high speeds, producing dazzling meteors. bright light.

Under normal circumstances, due to severe friction, most meteoroids entering the lower atmosphere are basically destroyed, and due to the huge air resistance and density difference, the probability of "air explosion" of meteoroids is also very high. The "epicentre" of the bolide event detected by the Qinghai Seismological Network this time is actually the shock wave generated by the bolide when it airbursts in the lower atmosphere and is transmitted to the ground. It reflects the location of the meteoroid's "airburst". Because the waveforms of larger meteoroid airbursts are different from those of general building collapses, geological disasters, etc.

Therefore, after the meteoroid airburst, meteorites of various sizes will be scattered over a very wide area. For example, on March 8, 1976, a meteorite weighing about 4 tons exploded at an altitude of about 19 kilometers above Jilin after being impacted by high-temperature and high-pressure airflow. The resulting "meteorite rain" landed in Jilin City. , Yongji County and the suburbs of Jiaohe City within a radius of 500 square kilometers. At that time, a group of 138 meteorite specimens were collected, with more than 3,000 fragments and a total weight of 2.616 tons. Among them, the largest Jilin No. 1 meteorite weighed 1.77 tons.

Another example is that in the early morning of February 15, 2013, an Apollo asteroid weighing approximately 11,000 tons was captured by the Earth’s gravity and fell into the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 18.6 kilometers per second, causing violent friction with the air. It burned and finally exploded at an altitude of 23.3 kilometers above Chelyabinsk, Russia, causing about 1,500 injuries and 7,200 buildings being damaged to varying degrees in the Chelyabinsk area of ??Russia.

In the car After the Yabinsk bolide event, hundreds of tons of dust generated entered the stratosphere of the Earth's atmosphere along with the airflow. This phenomenon has also been reported by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and NOAA (National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration) Observed by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partner (Suomi NPP) satellite. Scientists have determined through research that the energy released by this bolide event is equivalent to 450,000 tons of TNT, which is almost equivalent to more than 30 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Hiroshima, Japan. Moreover, this meteorite shower is believed to have occurred since 190 The most powerful explosion since the Tunguska explosion, but the largest meteorite left only weighed about 0.57 tons.

We all know that rare things are more valuable. The main reason why meteorites are so valuable is that they are of special origin and belong to materials other than the earth. They are very rare. Moreover, with the strengthening of space exploration research in many countries, And meteorites have health care collection value and are in great demand. This is why some meteorites can be sold for tens of thousands of yuan per gram, which is completely worth the price of gold on countless streets.

Let me give you a few examples of how valuable meteorites are:

1. The best-preserved 2.75kg black sapphire-green meteorite in China. It is neither a lunar meteorite nor a Martian meteorite. Since its origin is unknown and it is the only one in the world, it has a lot of room for appreciation. It was purchased by a mysterious collector in Beijing for 40 million yuan, which is equivalent to 14545.455 yuan per gram.

< p> 2. In 2015, the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited bids for a Martian meteorite weighing about 63 grams. The purchase price reached 6.2 million yuan. In terms of grams, it was 98,412.7 yuan, breaking the list of meteorites in China and even the world. A new record trading price.

3. A carbonaceous chondrite meteorite weighing more than two kilograms suddenly fell from the sky at the home of an Indonesian farmer named Joshua Hatagalong. Someone took it from him for 200 million Indonesian rupiah. (about 93,000 yuan). Later, when he heard that the buyer sold it for 120 times the purchase price, he suddenly felt like crying.

4. The meteorite rain in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 was a witnessed meteorite, and the price was very expensive. One gram was sold for 20,000 to 30,000 US dollars.

According to the material composition, meteorites are divided into three major categories, namely stony meteorites (mainly or entirely composed of silicate minerals), iron meteorites (mainly composed of iron and nickel), stony iron meteorites (silicon The content of salts and nickel-iron alloys each accounts for 50%). Judging from the meteorites collected by humans so far, most of them are stony meteorites. Most of them come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in the solar system, and a few come from the moon. , Mars or asteroids and other celestial bodies that have disintegrated and disappeared.

Due to the needs of scientific research, the earliest collection of meteorite samples mainly served some scientific research institutions. However, in addition to meteorites as extraterrestrial visitors, they also have extremely high collection and use values. Among civilian meteorites, there are also It is said that it can stabilize the house, protect the body, and ward off evil spirits, so people are more enthusiastic about meteorites.

Meteorites are authentic extraterrestrial objects. They are materials from outside the earth that humans have directly obtained so far. They carry many cosmic codes waiting for scientists to study and decipher, and help humans study the origin and exploration of the universe. Extraterrestrial civilizations provide help. You must know that whether it is the American moon landing that brought back hundreds of kilograms of lunar soil, or the Chinese Chang'e 5 mission to the moon that "digged" less than two kilograms of soil, a lot of manpower, material resources and materials were used. And nature is so generous in sending "gift packages" ranging from several tons to tens of tons at a time. We really shouldn't live up to this good intention and let those meteorites carrying cosmic information become bargaining chips.