The Yale Peabody Museum is now home to one of the oldest and most valuable scientifically significant meteorite collection. Their second donation — this trove from the Planetary Studies Foundation (PSF) in April — contained 1,800 meteorites, totaling their collection to 500 specimens and over 3600 meteorites localities.
“I am over the moon to be blessed with such a collection,” said Stefan Nicolescu, the Peabody’s collections manager for mineralogy and meteoritics. “All this contributes to our species as humans to understand where we come from.”
The vast majority of meteorites are leftovers from the beginning of the solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. Meteorites and meteors are commonly conflated with one another. A meteor is a light phenomenon that is generated by an object, like an asteroid falling through the atmosphere. A meteorite is an extraterrestrial object that originates in the solar system and surfaces on earth.
What is so unique about this donation is that it contains the only Antarctic meteorites not collected by a governmental expedition, privileging the Peabody Museum to become the only non-governmental organization with such a collection.
"The collection serves educational purposes from the general public to the doctoral and postdoctoral community," Nicolescu said. "With these materials, we are so fortunate to still be able to have, to study and to learn from it.”
Some of these newly obtained meteorites will be displayed in an exhibit when the museum reopens after completing renovations in 2024. The specialists and Yale's Earth and Planetary Science department will study some of the meteorites. In addition, microscopic samples of the meteorites will be available to researchers and scientists.
“Every meteorite is like a library,” Nicolescu said. “One can read the book if they have the language of chemistry, mineralogy and physics. Once we know the language, the information we gather gives us the possibility of understanding who we are and where we are going as human species.”
As the oldest meteorite collection in North America, the Peabody's meteorite specimens collection had always been vast but not varied. The PSF donation included rare lunar and martian meteorites, boosting the diversity of the museum's collection. Since the cataloging process is still ongoing, the exact final number is unknown.
These special space rocks inhabit the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars and range in sizes as nanoscopic as a grain of sand to as large as the dwarf planet Ceres.
“Meteorites fall in a very democratic manner,” Nicolescu said. “They fall across the entire planet and only a small portion that fall to earth every day and year are found. The ones that fall in the water are never found and they probably disintegrate in the environment.”
This is not the last donation from PSF as Nicolescu and his team plan to continue to collaborate with the foundation in classifying meteorites. Classifying meteorites is a process where meterotics specialists conduct chemical and microscopic analysis to determine the components of the meteorites, including its minerals.
There are two large categories of meteorites: chondrites and achondrites. Chondrites usually contain visible grains whereas the meteorites that are already differentiated are achondrites. Differentiated meteorites undergo melting and recrystallization that causes smaller visible grains.
The first gift from the PSF was the collection of the late James Dupont, including nearly 1,300 meteorites, with the requirement of preservation in 2017.
"After they saw the way we handle meteorites and how we respect the requirements of the donor, they felt comfortable and reassured to transfer the second installment to the Peabody Museum," Nicolescu said.
He hopes that attendees of the new meteorites exhibition take away the importance and the magic of these space rocks, specifically that everything started out from something akin to them.
“Some are very beautiful and are like mother nature's stained glass,” Nicolescu said. “But meteorites can be very gray and boring for someone who doesn’t work with them. It’s like the saying ‘a child only a mother can love.’”
