WTTW News has a piece about a new meteorite at the Field Museum. The new specimen is a 4-pound chunk of a meteorite that crashed into a Costa Rican village earlier this year. The chunk was purchased by frequent donor Terry Boudreaux, a retired health care executive. The unimpressive looking rock is a rare carbonaceous chondrite that contains large amounts of organic compounds that date to about 4.5 billion years ago.
The biggest piece of the meteorite discovered – the rock now in the Field’s possession – landed near a farm in Aguas Zarcas, a town of about 20,000 people northwest of San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital. Boudreaux said the mother of the family living on the farm found the rock within an hour of its fall and placed it in a sealed plastic bag, a crucial step that experts say helped preserve the rock’s potentially groundbreaking contents.
“We think meteorites like this contain the building blocks of life,” said Philipp Heck, the Field’s associate curator for meteoritics and polar studies. The rock likely holds answers to questions about the origin of the oxygen humans breathe and the carbon from which we are made, he said.
Of the 13,000 meteorite pieces in the museum’s collections, the new rock is the only of its kind, containing pristinely preserved amounts of stardust made up of materials that predate the Earth, sun and our entire solar system.
