Meteorite Found on Earth

Share to Google Classroom

There’s some super cool news from a new study! They found out that an arrowhead from the Bronze Age in Switzerland was actually made from a piece of a space rock called a meteorite!

This arrowhead was found a long time ago, back in the 1800s, near a place called Mörigen in Switzerland. People think it was made between 900 and 800 BCE, which is a really, really long time ago. And get this, it was found not far from where a meteorite fell in Estonia, another country. So, many people thought the arrowhead might be made from pieces of that space rock.

But guess what? The study from the Natural History Museum of Bren found out that the metal in the arrowhead didn’t match the meteorite from that area in Estonia. It turns out the metal in the arrowhead came from a different meteorite that fell in Estonia even earlier, around 1500 BCE.

The arrowhead is special because back in the Bronze Age, people didn’t have the technology to make iron like we do now. They couldn’t melt rocks to make iron, so finding something made of iron was super rare and precious. And guess what? They sometimes used pieces of meteorites to make things like this arrowhead!

This arrowhead isn’t the only one like it. There are only 55 similar objects that have been found in different places around the world, like Europe and Africa. Some of them even came from the tomb of a famous Egyptian king named Tutankhamun!

1
On 31 October each year, children in New Zealand and...
1
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has met face-to-face with United States...
1
Beachgoers in Santa Cruz, California, are being warned about an...
1
A year after the world’s biggest tractor sculpture was revealed...
1
Jade Henderson, a 32-year-old bodybuilder from Australia, has broken a...

World & National News

1
A group of locals in Bream Bay, Northland, New Zealand,...
1
Rainbow’s End amusement park in Auckland has launched its brand-new...
1
Two new measles cases have been confirmed in Wellington, both...
1
A surfboard lost at sea in Tasmania has been found...
1
On Sunday, Japan successfully launched a new rocket carrying an...