Advertisement

Buying a meteorite for US$3,000 a kilo? It’s almost certainly a fake, says leading Chinese scientist

Online sales of rock fragments pulled after astronomy expert warns it is exceptionally unlikely that they came from last week’s fireball

Reading Time:2 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
0
The fireball lit up the skies over Yunnan during the Mid Autumn Festival: Twitter.

Rock fragments that were claimed to be the remains of a meteorite that was seen in the skies above southwestern China last week have been removed from sale after a leading scientist warned that they were almost certainly fakes.

Members of the public have been searching for fragments after a huge fireball was spotted in the skies above Yunnan province on October 4, when many people were out watching the full moon as part of the Mid-Autumn Festival celebrations.

Meteorite hunters used sport utility vehicles, GPS and drones to scour Shangri-La county after Nasa calculated that was the likely landing site for whatever remained of the meteor.

Fragments of rock priced at 20,000 yuan (US$3,000) per kilogram appeared for sale on Taobao, a popular e-commerce site in China, according to the Beijing Morning Post.

But Xu Weibiao, chief scientist at Purple Mountain Observatory, China’s official institute of astronomy, told the newspaper: “They are all fake.”

He said the hunters were unlikely to find any trace of the meteorite even though it entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a higher velocity and exploded at a lower altitude than one seen over the Xilin Gol prefecture in Inner Mongolia in 2014.

Advertisement