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the largest meteorite slice in the world

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550 kilo slab

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found in 1963 in northern Greenland

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found by Vagn Buchwald

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wrote a 2,500 page book describing every iron meteorite known on the planet

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has a crystal structure

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formed from when the iron core of the asteroid from which this meteorite came crystallized 4.5 billion years ago

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you can see how slowly the core cooled

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30 degrees per one million years

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therefore it's impossible to duplicate this material, you can't make fake iron meteorites

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we don't have the time to cool something so slowly

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the meteorite is uniformly a crystal

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you see the same crystal pattern all across the surface

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theoretically, uniform crystals of this kind could be kilometers wide

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elongated, dark inclusions

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this is troilite, an iron sulfide mineral

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can be found as a native mineral on Earth, but is more abundant in meteorites, in particular those originating from the Moon and Mars

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they could not fit into the metal structure

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it is similar to when you freeze salt water, the salt will concentrate in the remaining liquid which will get more and more salty and you will have to cool it at lower temperatures to make this remaining salt water freeze

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so the elongated features are the last portion of the melt that remained

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there are little crystals in the troilite areas which were a little heavier than the liquid

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this 10-kilometer-in-diameter asteroid had its own gravity field, of course pointed toward its center, this meteorite was just a fragment of it

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the astroid that this meteorite came from collided with another asteroid some 600 million years ago

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the fragments from the collision are still raining down on the earth

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it's the most common type of iron meteorite we have today

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we have 300 pieces of the collision which have hit the earth within the last few thousand years and they keep coming