[meteorite-list] Just Another Question

[Mark Crawford]

A related question I pondered a while back: How big does an object  
need to be to be a 'parent body'?  Is the meteorite ever the full  
remnant of the PB?

In other words, can something be big and coherent enough to survive  
passage through the atmosphere and produce a meteorite, which hasn't  
previously been part of a much larger body?

My (rather ill-educated) guess would be that candidates would be very  
primitive and undifferentiated, with a very pretty low density.

Mark


Quoting Jeff Grossman <jgrossman at usgs.gov>:

> Alan Rubin and I grappled with this issue in our article in Meteorite!
> 10 years ago, "What is a meteorite? The pursuit of a comprehensive
> definition." We wanted a definition that would exclude things like
> tektites from being called meteorites.  Our definition then said that,
> to be called a meteorite, an object  had to escape the dominant
> gravitational influence of its parent body.