The three meteorites are named after the places where they were found – Mont Sujet in the Bernese Jura, Mürtschenstock in canton Glarus and Chasseron in canton Vaud – according to a press release on Monday from a group of Swiss natural history museums, federal technology institute ETH Zurich and the University of Bern.
The Chasseron meteorite was found in 1959 by a 16-year-old student but it was only in 2017, after reading a number of newspaper articles, that he realised the potential importance of his find and sent it to Bern’s natural history museum.
Eleven meteorites are now officially recognised as Swiss.
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Meteorites are fragments of bodies from our solar system which have fallen to Earth. Most of them come from asteroids, or more rarely from the moon or Mars. They are of high scientific interest and finders should notify natural history or geological museums.
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Decades on, hundreds of meteorite pieces found
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The Bern Natural History Museum announced on Thursday that its search efforts, led by researcher Beda Hofmann, turned up more than 600 fragments over the past few years, in what is one of the three largest scatter fields in Europe. The Twannberg meteorite broke into hundreds of pieces when it entered earth’s atmosphere. It is…
Swiss geologists make important meteorite discovery
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The geologists from the University of Bern and the city’s Natural History Museum both characterised the find as very important. Of the 20,000 meteorites discovered on Earth, only 18 have come from Mars. Until the expected return of the Mars probe in 2012, scientists will have to rely on the information provided by meteorites like…
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