Ensisheim (meteorite)

Ensisheim
Ensisheim meteorite in the town's museum
Type	Chondrite
Class	Ordinary chondrite
Group	LL6[1]
Country	France
Region	Ensisheim
Observed fall	Yes[2]
Fall date	7 November 1492
Found date	7 November 1492
TKW	127 kg (280 lb)

The Ensisheim meteorite is a stony meteorite observed to fall on November 7, 1492 in a wheat field outside the walled town of Ensisheim in then Alsace, Further Austria (now France). The meteorite can still be seen in Ensisheim's museum, the sixteenth-century Musée de la Régence.

Features

The meteorite is an LL6 ordinary chondrite, weighing 127 kilograms (280 lb); it was described as triangular in shape, and it created a 1-metre (3 ft 3 in) deep hole upon impact.^[2]

Contemporary response

A copy of the original Brant text with a stylised image of the Ensisheim meteorite's fall.

The fall of the meteorite through the Earth's atmosphere was observed as a fireball for a distance of up to 150 kilometres from where it eventually landed.

Sebastian Brant (1458–1521), satirist and author of "Das Narrenschiff" described the meteorite and its fall in the poem, "Loose Leaves Concerning the Fall of the Meteorite".^[3]

Residents of the walled town and nearby farms and villages gathered at the location to raise the meteorite from its impact hole and began removing pieces of the meteorite.

A local magistrate interfered with the destruction of the stone, in order to preserve the object for King Maximilian, the son of reigning Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III. A piece of the meteorite was sent to Cardinal Piccolomini (later Pope Pius III) at the Vatican along with a number of related verses written by Brant.^[3]

Brant created broadsheets in Latin and German with a poem about the meteorite describing it as an omen. The fall is also described in Folio 257 of the Nuremberg Chronicle.^[4] German painter and mathematician Albrecht Dürer sketched his observations of the fall of the meteorite.

References

1. McSween, Jr., Harry Y.; Marvin E. Bennett III, Eugene Jarosewich (1991). "The Mineralogy of Ordinary Chondrites and Implications for Asteroid Spectrophotometry". Icarus 90: 107–116. Bibcode:1991Icar...90..107M. doi:10.1016/0019-1035(91)90072-2. Cite uses deprecated parameter |coauthors= (help);
2. McSween, Harry Y. (1999). Meteorites and Their Parent Planets (2. ed.). Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-58303-9.
3. A Contemporary Account of the Ensisheim Meteorite, 1492 Rowland, I. D. (1990), Meteoritics, volume 25, number 1, page 19.
4. Marvin, Ursula B. (1992). "The meteorite of Ensisheim: 1492 to 1992". Meteoritics 27: 28–72. Bibcode:1992Metic..27...28M. doi:10.1111/j.1945-5100.1992.tb01056.x. Retrieved 4 March 2012.

See also

• Glossary of meteoritics