New Bavarian Meteorite

[David Entwistle]

SPIEGEL ONLINE are reporting the find of a new meteorite in Bavaria.

The location appears to be near here.

Google translation:

A field stone from near Dachau has proven to be a meteorite. "That such a meteorite, whose case was not directly observed, is found in Germany, is a sensation and rarer than winning the lottery," the deputy director of the Mineralogical State Collection Munich, Rupert High Leitner said.

The stone was more than 50 years ago by a farmer's son in power stone at Dachau found. He was last years as a water stone in a front yard. A man who wanted to write a history of the place, recalled this year to the lost piece and contacted a Augsburger researchers. The then referred him to the Mineralogical State Collection in Munich.

Now the boulder had been identified as a stone meteorite weighing 1422 grams, explained the Bavarian State Collection. It was around 4.5 billion years old and comes therefore as the earth from the time when the solar system was formed. The meteorite is to be shown on the minerals days Munich, beginning on October 25th.

[David Entwistle]

I see this meteorite is officially known as Machtenstein.

Bayern, Germany
Found: 1956
Classification: Ordinary chondrite (H5)

Found by a landowner during farming in his field in 1956 (or some years later) near Machtenstein. Because of its unusual appearance, the stone was kept by the finder in his farm house. In 1982 the stone was given to a friend, who preserved it for several decades, until it was rediscovered and recognized as a meteorite in 2014.

It gets a very brief mention in this video from the Munich Mineral Show.

If I understand this news item correctly, the meteorite is the property of Staatlichen Naturwissenschaftlichen Sammlungen Bayerns (SNSB) and, after the Munich Mineral Show, will initially be handed over to Naturkundemuseum Bayern. The meteorite will then tour the SNSB regional museums of Eichstätt, Bamberg, Bayreuth and Nördlingen.