While museums are closed, York Museums Trust boss REYAHN KING will introduce a different object each week 

This week: The Middlesbrough Meteorite: York’s shooting star

I’ve chosen this object because it gives us just a bit of perspective on our times. There is something comforting in remembering the smallness of our place in the solar system. This object was formed at the same time as the Earth and at over 4.5 billion years old it is definitely York Museums Trust’s oldest object!

It is a meteorite found in Middlesbrough on 14th March 1881 by four railway workers at Pennyman’s Siding.

Their work was interrupted by a ‘rushing or roaring sound overhead’, followed by a thud. Confused, they went to try and find the source. What they discovered was a hole about a foot deep in the railway ballast about 15 metres from them.

They reached into the hole and found an object, which they described as “new milk warm”. They assumed it must be a piece of slag ejected from a passing locomotive.

Ten days later, it was put in front of a scientist, famous astronomer Alexander Herschel. He examined it and excitedly declared: ‘the unusual looking stony fragment is really a genuine meteorite of an exceptionally perfect description and appearance.’

Hershel identified it as an ‘aërolite’ or ‘stony’ meteorite, which meant that it had been formed at the same time as the Earth and the Solar System, thrown out into space as part of the process.

The meteorite fell on North Eastern Railway land and they decided to present it to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, the founders of the Yorkshire Museum, on 16 September 1881. The meteorite has remained at the Yorkshire Museum ever since. Even though the meteorite itself is in the Yorkshire Museum, small samples were taken from it shortly after it fell. These are now in the collections of the Natural History Museum in London, the Natural History Museum of Vienna, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Although the Middlesbrough Meteorite is not a very rare type chemically (around 90 per cent of known meteorite finds are stony ‘chondrites’ like this), it is a very special example.

Firstly, meteorites heard to fall are incredibly rare, and only a handful are recovered every year worldwide. This gives us information on the trajectory and nature of the meteorite’s journey. The Yorkshire Museum even holds a cast of the hole that the impact made. Because the meteorite landed in railway ballast next to the track, it made a narrow and deep hole, rather than a crater that most people might expect.

Herschel calculated the speed of impact as about 280 miles per hour! The railway workers must have been pleased that they weren’t any closer to it when it fell.

Secondly, the shape of the meteorite is very unusual.

It is roughly conical and scored with deep grooves. This reflects the fact that it didn’t tumble as it came through the Earth’s atmosphere.

Usually, meteorites form very irregular shapes as they twist and turn and break up on their journey. Instead the dark outer coating on the Middlesbrough Meteorite, known as the fusion crust, reflects how it was melted and moulded in one orientation as it shot through the atmosphere and was heated to thousands of degrees.

The shape of the Middlesbrough Meteorite is so special that NASA scanned it into its database in 2010, so that future missions to Mars will be able to recognise similar meteorites on its surface.

When the meteorite fell in 1881 it caused a stir as a small piece of the Solar System crashed into the lives of four ordinary men in North Yorkshire.

It is now rightly recognised as one of the ‘star’ objects in the Yorkshire Museum’s collections – a literal shooting star preserved in York.

  • This is the first in a new series by York Museums Trust chief executive Reyahn King introducing a different object from the Trust's collection each week. The column will run while museums and galleries remain closed.