Abstract
H. H. MININGER, Colorado Museum of Natural History, in a paper entitled “Trends in Meteoritics” (Sky and Telescope, 1, 8 ; June, 1942), gives a short résumé of our knowledge of meteorites. Most hypotheses in the past regarding the origin of these bodies gave more attention to iron than to stone meteorites, and erroneous conclusions were drawn. Chondrules, the most abundant of all meteoric constituents, have almost certainly been formed by repeated collisions between crystals and other solid bodies. For this reason, a situation which would provide for the rounding of crystals into chondrules would also produce the fragmentary matrix in which chondrules are usually embedded. It is suggested that in the past, when the sun was more active, extruded gases crystallized and collected into cometary swarms and within these swarms chondrules were produced by repeated collisions, while the aggregation of the resulting fragments and chondrules gave rise to meteorites. Some of the cometary swarms passed close enough to the sun to allow for the fusing of a percentage of the constituent grains, and this process was carried almost to the point of completely fusing the mass in the Lubbock aerolite, which was described in the American Mineralogist (25, 528-33 ; 1940).
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Origin of Meteorites. Nature 150, 175 (1942). https://doi.org/10.1038/150175a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/150175a0