[meteorite-list] An alternative origin of tektites

[Graham Christensen]

Wow...I never heard about that 1913 event. I wonder if there could be more 
stuff floating around up there. Would something the size of a tektite be 
detectable by ground based radar?

I typed up the article and have tried sending it to the list 9 times now and 
it hasn't gone through. The article is from the summer of 2004.

Graham
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Graham Christensen
voltage at telus.net
http://www.geocities.com/aerolitehunter
msn messenger: majorvoltage at hotmail.com



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sterling K. Webb" <kelly at bhil.com>
To: "Graham Christensen" <voltage at telus.net>; 
<Meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2005 10:26 AM
Subject: Re: [meteorite-list] An alternative origin of tektites


> Hi, Graham, List.
>
>    The notion derives from the curious history of the "Chant Trace."  On
> February 9,  1913, there were a huge rash of fireball reports stretching 
> from
> far Western Canada (Regina) across to upper New York state and New York 
> City
> itself.  The numbers of reports were in the hundreds or thousands, and 
> they were
> of "trains" of multiple fireballs that passed overhead, followed by more
> "trains" of multiple fireballs, followed by more "trains" of multiple 
> fireballs,
> a show lasting 10-15 minutes at a time.
>    This is highly unusual, to put it mildly.  A Canadian astronomer named 
> Chant
> investigated it at length and was able to plot a great circle path for 
> these
> events and to determine that the reports were chronologically compatible, 
> that
> is, in correct sequence.  He concluded that there actually had been a 
> "train" of
> hundreds of fireballs chasing themselves across North America.  He even 
> found
> reports from ships at sea, as far away as the South Atlantic off Brazil, 
> that
> matched up.  He published his results in the Journal of the Royal 
> Astronomical
> Society of Canada in 1913, but he never explained what would cause such a
> remarkable event. It is now referred to as the "Chant Trace."
>    In the 1950's, John O'Keefe jumped on the obvious conclusion (which
> hopefully the sharp ones among us have already guessed) that the only way 
> to
> account for this was the decay of an object from low earth orbit!  He 
> conducted
> a search of 8,000 local newspapers across the US and Canada
> for reports of such fireball trains and plotted the results on the map. 
> He
> discovered that there TWO stripes of fireball trains, parallel to each 
> other but
> with the second one displaced to the south.  Whatever the decaying object 
> was,
> it survived through TWO passes of the Earth's atmosphere.
>    This argues a substantial object, big, massing millions of pounds, 
> caught in
> an gravitationally bound geocentric orbit!  Now, it may have been a 
> "fresh"
> capture, an object that approaches the Earth at low encounter velocities, 
> glazes
> the atmosphere, is captured, and immediately decays and breaks up, in 
> which the
> Earth has a second "moon" for a couple of hours.  OR, it could be the 
> final
> moments of a second "moon" that has been in place, undetected, for 
> thousands or
> millions of years.
>    An object of a few hundred meters diameter would never have been 
> detected
> directly by XIXth century astronomy.  But there are all those anomalous
> "transit" events from XIXth century astronomers, you know, often touted as 
> proof
> of the discovery of a new planet, intra-Mercurian.  There is a famous case 
> of
> such a detection during a solar eclipse which didn't pan out, and so 
> forth.
> Check discoveries of "Vulcan."  (No, not that Vulcan, Trekites!)
>    O'Keefe coined the term "Cyrillids" for such objects, but it never 
> caught
> on. He proposed that the decay of short term natural satellites of a 
> silicate
> composition was the source of tektites, that the Earth had had four such 
> "moons"
> in the last 35 million years, each one creating a tektite strewn field in 
> its
> final decay, a perfectly good dynamic conclusion, but, you know, folks 
> didn't
> take to the notion of a lot of extra moons!
>    The idea was revived in the past 20 years by somebody whose name I 
> can't
> remember, who threw in the notion of rings, also dynamically possible. 
> That's
> probably the article you saw.  I recall a popular article from the 
> mid-80's that
> was illustrated with an artist's rendering of a tropical island night 
> scene
> looking out over the ocean with the Earth's Rings arcing across the sky!
> Personally, I like it. Why should Saturn have all the fun?
>
> Sterling Webb
> ----------------------------------------------------
> Graham Christensen wrote:
>
>  I read an article in the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada journal 
> that
> said that the Earth once had a ring of tektites or a system of rings 
> around it
> and when the supercontinent pangea formed, the earth's gravitational field
> became lop-sided and the tektite material in the ring ended up in an 
> orbital
> resonance with pangea and the tektites formed a clump or "ring arc" that 
> was
> directly over pangea at perigee. When pangea broke up, the resonance 
> dissapeared
> and the ring arc's orbit began to decay The shape and distribution of the
> australasian tektite strewnfield and the ablasion characteristics of the
> tektites is consistent with a ring arc's orbit decaying and eventually 
> bringing
> the material crashing to earth at a low angle.
>
>  Furthermore, the tektites associated with the chesapeake bay crater may 
> in
> fact have been dragged down by the impactor's gravitational field as it 
> passed
> through or near the rings and this may be the case with other tektite 
> fields as
> well.
>
>  I have the article here on paper but I can't find it on the internet. I'm 
> not
> sure if this has been posted before but if anyone's interested I could 
> type up
> the text and E-mail it to the list.
>
>  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>  Graham Christensen
>  voltage at telus.net
>  http://www.geocities.com/aerolitehunter
>  msn messenger: majorvoltage at hotmail.com
>
>
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