Meteorites, Chelyabinsk Region, Russia
Chelyabinsk meteorite
Chelyabinsk LL5
A stone from the brightest fireball of the twenty-first century.
476 000 ₽ · In stock — Gimenei shopping centre
- Epoch
- Before life began
- Age
- ≈ 4.5 billion years
- Origin
- Chelyabinsk Region, Russia
- Size
- 70 × 55 × 30 mm
- Weight
- 119 g
- Classification
- Stony meteorite (Chelyabinsk, chondrite)
- Ref.
- R–0303
An ordinary chondrite has not passed through complete melting: its material sintered within a stony asteroid and remained as it was at the beginning of the Solar System. This body never became a planet — a collision broke it apart, and the fragment travelled towards the Earth until it blazed above the Urals.
On the morning of 15 February 2013 the brightest fireball of the century blazed above Chelyabinsk: a body about twenty metres in diameter entered the atmosphere and exploded at an altitude of thirty kilometres, and the shock wave blew out the windows of thousands of houses. Fragments rained down across the snow from Chebarkul to Yemanzhelinsk.
Chelyabinsk is an ordinary chondrite of type LL5, the substance of a contemporary of the Solar System. This individual has retained an intact fusion crust — a thin black film set in a few seconds of atmospheric flight.