Mount Allison University in Sackville will host two lectures over the next week dealing with the discovery of the Buzzard Coulee meteorite and the brightest supernova in the last 400 years. Lecturer Ellen Milley and Dr. Ian Shelton of Mount Allison's physics department will be speaking on two of the most famous Canadian discoveries ever in astronomy and space science. Read more
As a meteorite rocketed across the sky in Alberta just over a year ago, associate professor Christopher Herd was driving his children home from day care. He caught just a flicker of the light show out of the corner of his eye. There were hundreds of reports from across the province of people who saw the meteorite fall, lighting up the sky in shades of yellow, orange and green. Read more
As technology increasingly allows us to explore the outer bounds of our universe, it is a magical occasion when a piece of the mystery falls through Earth's atmosphere. The blazing Buzzard Coulee meteorite hurtled to Earth southeast of Lloydminster, Saskatchewan on Nov. 20, 2008. Soon after, University of Calgary department of geoscience associate professor and Canada Research Chair holder in Planetary Science Dr. Alan Hildebrand and graduate student Ellen Milley were the first to find and set out on a record-breaking hunt for fragments of the 10-tonne fireball.
They've been counted, catalogued and fit together like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. Now, a portion of the hundreds of fragments from the 10-tonne Buzzard Coulee meteorite that lit up the skies above Alberta and Saskatchewan last fall are being returned to the landowners who lent them for scientific research.
Fragments of a 10-tonne asteroid found along the Alberta/Saskatchewan border have already been dubbed the Marsden Meteorite by excited locals. University of Calgary researchers Alan Hildebrand and graduate student Ellen Millet discovered several pieces of the space rock late Thursday near Marsden, a farming village of 275 people about 270 kilometres southeast of Edmonton.
Tara Patmore, who lives in Lloydminster, a city that straddles the AlbertaSaskatchewan boundary, was among dozens of people who found 21 pieces of the massive Buzzard Coulee meteor that lit up Western Canadian skies in November.
Family cashing in on space rocks Patmore and her family are cashing in the little rocks, some as small as her palm, that landed in her fathers former farm by selling them to friends as well as to strangers via the Internet on Kijiji and Craigslist. Her friend bought one for $1,800 while the ones listed on Kijiji and Craigslist are selling for anywhere from $7 a gram to $25 a gram - the smallest being 19 g and largest weighing in at 159 g.