King Tut's necklace stone has meteorite origins

King Tut's necklace stone has meteorite origins
Washington | June 30, 2006 4:18:33 PM IST

Egyptian Pharaoh, King Tutankhamen's necklace centrepiece was a high quality glass that was formed as a result of a meteorite impact, if a new research is to be believed.

Geologists conducted a chemical composition test on the centrepiece necklace stone British archaeologist Howard Carter found in Tutankhamen's tomb in the 'Valley of the Kings' in Luxor. They said the yellow green glass beetle neckpiece-carved like a scarab-a symbol of ancient Egyptian fertility-shaped like dung beetles, was made of natural desert glass found only in the Great Sand Sea of the eastern Sarah desert.

Scientists believe that since heat from a meteorite strike produced the Great Sea glass, also known as the Libyan Desert glass, it is very likely that the centrepiece of King Tutankhamen's necklace was the result of a great meteorite hit.

"With a silica content of 98 percent, it is the purest known glass in the world. The desert region, located 500 miles southwest of Cairo, yields this glass in a remote 49.7 by 15.5 rectangular area. I think an Egyptian craftsman obtained the glass and worked it into a point or scraper tool," said Mark Boslough, who led a recent study on how the glass formed.

"Glass fractures in ways that create sharp, useful shapes, so pieces commonly were used for tools. The glass is also often quite beautiful with interesting colours, so a jewellery maker might have taken an old tool and reworked it into the scarab," he said.

Boslough, an impact physics expert at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, said the glass could have been the result of an impact with the Earth, of a 390-foot-wide asteroid travelling at a speed of 12.4 miles per second. He also created computer simulations to study the impact of the meteorite hit.

"The velocity of the impacting object would have produced more energy than a nuclear explosion. It not only would have had nuclear explosive scale, but its energy would all have been concentrated downwards. The temperature of the resulting fireball would have been as hot as the sun's surface. Like a blowtorch melting wax, the heat would have melted sand and sandstone into thin layers, which, when cooled, resulted in glass that later was blown into piles across the esert," he said.

Boslough said further evidence of "shock minerals", like quartz, which reveal sheer plane structures under magnification having been found in the same desert, also corroborate the meteorite strike theory, reports Discovery News.

Scientists believe such structures result from the sudden deformation caused by asteroid and fireball impacts.

Prof. Farouk El-Baz, from the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University, who at first was critical of Boslough's theory and had said that if the glass was of meteoric origin, there should be a crater of that age," found remnant of the largest crater in the Saharan desert.

Prof. El Baz now believes that an extraterrestrial impact that resulted in the crater may have een responsible for the desert glass.

The findings were presented at a geophysics symposium at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. They also will be featured in an upcoming BBC2 television program, "King Tut's Fireball". (ANI)

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