The hunt is on for a falling star believed to have fallen somewhere at the confluence of Shashe and Motloutse Rivers or buried itself in a hole somewhere in the region a fortnight ago.
The National Museum and Art Gallery launched the search for the fallen star on Friday, urging people in the Bobirwa and Tswapong to look for traces of the star, or meteorite as it is called in science. It is believed to have fallen from the moon.
The public is being urged to be on the lookout for strange rocks or a hole in the ground that has signs of burning. But the star should not be removed or collected from where it is found, the Department of National Museum and Monuments warns.
The falling star was seen in the night of November 21 and was also witnessed in parts of neighbouring South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe as it shot across the sky producing a glowing light. However, it was in the Bobirwa and Tswapong in Botswana that the star's tremendous light turned the night into day for a moment before causing a deafening blast as it crashed. People in Ramotswa in the South East District also talk about this spectacular cosmic occurrence. Now the National Museum wants to locate the object from the heavens.
The National Museum and Art Gallery says the fallen star should look like a piece of metal, a stone or metal-like stone that has fallen to earth from outer space. "The meteorite burns in the sky, producing a glowing light before reaching the ground and they (meteriotes) range from marble-ball size to soccer-ball size," the department said in a Friday statement. The department adds that the star can be identified by a burnt outer surface that is black in colour that does not flake or streak off when rubbed against other surfaces.
This is not the first time a star has fallen on Botswana. In 1999, a precious 30-pound (13.5 kg) star from the moon known as moon rock, was found in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, but was exported to America without the knowledge of the government.
The discovery of the fallen star in the Kalahari Desert was only made public in 2007 when National Geographic reported on December 6 of that year that the Kalahari man-shaped moon rock had helped scientists to form an opinion about how planets develop. Scientist Mahesh Anand of Open University in Milton Keynes, England was quoted in the National Geographic as saying that the Kalahari rock seemed like it fell to earth relatively recently, unlike many lunar meteorites.
He estimated the star fell 200 to 300 years ago from the moon when an asteroid hit the lunar surface. It is this rock that shed new light regarding when volcanic activity actually started in the moon, leading Anand to conclude that volcanic activity in the moon started much earlier than scientists thought.
"The beauty of the moon is that it preserves almost the entire history of the solar system," Anand was quoted as saying in the National Geographic.
The research around the Kalahari rock also shed rare light on the earliest stages of planet formation, which has largely been lost on earth, according to the National Geographic report of 2007.
Source:mmegi.bw/i
No comments:
Post a Comment