Some Beautiful Birthday Kryptonite!
From outer space. Orbiting in the asteroid belt for billions of years.
It is the result of the violent destruction of what would otherwise have been a planet during the formation of our solar system. It comes from the boundary between the silica rich mantle and the iron-nickel core of a now extinct planet, torn away by a catastrophic impact with another planet or asteroid.
We know the parent body was large enough to have a molten core differentiated from the outer crust and mantle (like our Earth, it takes sufficient gravity to separate the elements of the periodic table).
A mix of solid stone forming olivine crystals in suspension in liquid metal (iron-nickel) was flung into space to cool over millions of years in a vacuum and zero gravity, forming this beautiful mixture (which could not be created on Earth as the motel metal and rock would separate by density).
This is a rare ungrouped pallasite — popularized as kryptonite in Superman Returns — and first discovered in Magadan, Russia. Most of the meteorite is in the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Only 1% of all meteorites are pallasites, the most visually dazzling of all meteorites. This core slice slab reveals an abundance of translucent yellowish-green Olivine crystals (“space gems”) over otherwise metallic surfaces which exhibit the Widmanstätten pattern associated with the Iron alloy.
In contrast with Earth alloys, the microgravity environment and long cooling times in the interior of their parent asteroids allowed the meteoritic phases to grow into large, intermixed three-dimensional crystalline structures. This metal pattering could not be created on Earth, as it literally requires a cooling period of 2-4°C per million years, in zero gravity. It is the metal of magical vorpal blades of lore. People found such metal alloys long before the age of steel, and they do not rust. King Tut was buried with his metal meteorite dagger.
Found: June 1967
Pallasite, PMG
Magadanskaya Oblast, Russia – (62° 54’N, 152° 26’E)
17cm x 10cm, 144.2 grams
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