Nah, "fireplace mantle" is an acceptable alternate spelling for "fireplace mantel. He's just pulling your chain.

Have you tried the experiment of using a magnet to pull metal fragments from ordinary dirt and then checking them under a microscope to see if they appear to have melted? I tried this as a kid and easily convinced myself I had found meteoritic material. Collect enough and perhaps you could make something suitable for display on your mantel. (In which case, you have to send us pics.) :-)

--Greg

Hey, I strive for complete anality in spelling so that I can feed my innate sense of overwhelming superiority...I accept Shaka's rebuke!

Re magnet-dust meteors: I've heard that much of that stuff actually IS meteoritic material, which makes sense since literally tons of crap hits the atmosphere every day world-wide. Dunno if that's an urban legend or not; will try to dig up a reputable reference.

EDIT: Wow, that didn't take long. Here's a teacher's lesson plan from PBS' Nova on how to collect & identify micrometeors! Near the end there's also mention of an ongoing project by one of the US government research agencies (forget which one...USGS?) to characterize the stuff.

Report of a "meteorite like object" creating a crater in Latvia on CNN this morning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5C-Lh3UfQ8...player_embedded

Was most likely a man made object. Maybe even faked The rest of the burnt thing looks odd. Why should right there be a single burning thing after such a massive explosion?


...or a flammable meteorite/object outside of any norm ?

Latvian Experts Say Meteorite Crater Was Hoax

If you see a meteor, is there any way to tell whether it probably survived to reach the ground? I remember reading somewhere, years ago, that if you can hear noises it probably reached the ground... is there any truth to that?

Just wondering because I saw a really bright meteor last night, but no actual 'fireball' or sound.

A dent in your car would be a good indication that it reached the ground.

We had a big fireball up here in Ontario too, a few weeks ago. I heard an eyewitness report on Friday, and my buddies in Meteor Physics are collecting pieces of it. One fragment smashed a van window. Where's my can of repellant?

Phil

I haven't heard of a correlation between sounds and meteorites being found on the ground. "sound effects" accompanying meteors has been a somewhat controversial (in the good, scientific sense) for a while...

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q...mp;aq=f&oq=

http://www.pibburns.com/catastro/metsound.htm

I heard one make a sound...10 Aug 72.

If it doesn't make a sound, then it definitely didn't hit the ground.

I'll go out on a limb and claim that applies to trees too. :-)

--Greg

Greg, that was truly rancid...

That made me check up on the date of one my old mum remembers seeing heading over the Irish sea (and it made such an impression on her she still recalls it with wonder today); I remembered her saying it was some time late 60s - turns out, after a bit of searching about, to have been what is now known as the Bovedy meteortite in 1969.
And its sound was in fact recorded - fortuantely someone was recording birdsong at the time:
http://fernlea.tripod.com/bovedy.wav

50 kiloton explosion over Indonesia!

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news165.html


Fireball's dust trail was captured on video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeQBzTkJNhs...eos=jkRJgbXY-90

The article makes me wish we had more info and possibly more images on this (local cameras? satellites?).

Fortunately, the small asteroid didn't make it deeper before it exploded. It would have been catastrophic.


There was also a noise/sound recorded from the Netherlands fireball:
http://www.hemelwacht.net/geluiden/geluid.htm
onversterkt/versterkt=normal/boosted
straaljager=jet plane