HURLED INTO SPACE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20288, 22 June 1929, Page 3 (Supplement)

HURLED INTO SPACE.

FIFTY-TON METEORITE*

AFRICA'S NOTABLE .VISITOR.

Grootfontein in South-West Africa is keeping np the reputation of Africa for v

always producing something new. There has just been found in its sterile wastes a meteorite that in some unknown era fell from the sky, and weighs fifty tons.

There are two kinds of these missiles which have been hurled at the earth, one kind resembling the older igneous rocks and the'other'containing iron. The Grootfontein meteorite js of the second kind, and seems to have Jbeen subjected at some time to such terrific heat that a great part of it has been' turned into nickel steel.

The origin of meteors is a. mystery. According to-one reckoning they may be the debris of the solar system,, primal matter evolved from stuff from which stars and • nebulae are being born. Or they may have been cast - ont by ; planets not our own, and thus acquire the enormous speed at which they travel; of, again, they may bo parts of comets, flung out ahead and from thie rear, thousands of miles in extent, and cut periodically by the earth during her yearly course round the sun.

Still more romantic, and not less scientific, is the theory worked out on careful mathematical lines by Sir Robert Bajl. To him fireball, meteor, shooting-star, were simply prodigals or exiles returning home to the earth. According ,to his investigations the Earth, during the eras of frightful volcanic convulsion which shook her, hurled from gigantic craters' enormous masses of material. These,. passing beyond the gravitational pull of the world, would assume orbits. of their own, ha thought, in which they have over sine* moved, until we have at last crossed tllßlr paths and drawn them home again. There are romance and mystery in every meteor that comes to earth. Ntt element unknown on earthy is in them. They bring " even diamonds, formed by pure carbon, acted upon by raumeroua heat and pressure in the flying projectile. There is terror in a meteorite, too. Soma astronomers, when they read the story of a ship lost at sea without trace write against the record a verdict: in One word: Meteorite!