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11.22 gram part slice. 51 x 52 x 2mm.   H5

TKW 6.4 kg. Observed fall 24 July 1790, Aquitaine, France.


     

Darryl writes:

Barbotan is among my favorite meteorites — and not just because a few years hence it happened to fall on what would be my birthday. 😉

On the evening of July 24, 1790 a fireball, with attendant sonic phenomena, was seen streaking across southwestern France. It was a cloudless summer night and thousands who took to having a stroll that evening in the midst of the French Revolution bore witness to the event. Among those out for a walk was a physicist who documented what he had seen. Subsequently, there were numerous reports of stones having fallen out of the sky, one of which purportedly punched a hole in the hut of a herdsman — killing him.

There was, however, a big problem. Rocks falling out of the sky was a notion that did not fit with the preconceived order the things and there was a lot of pushback on the part of scientists. And thus a challenging conundrum: how could it be possible for a meteorite impact to be responsible for a death when at the time it was believed meteorites did not exist? Such nonacceptance would also explain, in part, why so few Barbotan meteorites today exist. And if there is little attention is paid to the rocks themselves, I would imagine there would even be less interest in the mayhem they create — and especially when having occurred at a time when determining the cause of any death was not a big priority.

With one edge of fusion crust, this is a terrific partial slice of one of the Holy Grails of meteorites and it’s available at no reserve at Christie’s “No Reserve” sale which ends on February 23rd.

View the Catalog for Christie's Deep Impact: Martian, Lunar and Other Rare Meteorites