The Hoba was described as the largest meteorite in the world in a Reddit post.
Although it is technically true that the Hoba is the largest meteorite discovered on Earth's surface, it is merely the biggest meteorite that is known and palpable.
How Experts Found Hoba Meteoroid
In 1920, a farmer in Namibia was plowing a field when his plow abruptly came to a stop. He searched the ground for what he had encountered and discovered a massive metal object. Scientists and others were soon drawn to the enormous metal lump, and they recognized it as a meteorite. So, they cleared the area surrounding it.
Geology.com mentioned that the farmer uncovered a 66-ton iron meteorite weighing in at the heaviest chunk of iron ever found close to the surface of the Earth. It measures around nine feet long, nine feet broad, and three feet thick. It is tabular in shape. Since it was found on a farm called "Hoba," it was given the name "Hoba West."
Hoba is believed to have hit the planet 80,000 years ago. About 84 percent of it is iron, 16 percent is nickel, and there are traces of cobalt and other elements. The meteorite may have been much larger than 66 tons when it fell and has seen considerable losses due to oxidation based on the quantity of iron oxides in the soil.
The lack of a crater around this meteorite is unexpected. This magnitude of an object should strike Earth with enough force to blow a sizable crater and rip through the atmosphere at a very high rate of speed. Around the meteorite's location, there isn't a single crater. This implies that it came down to Earth more slowly than anticipated. Some experts think the object's flat form may be to blame for its slow speed at impact.
Experts Remain Baffled If Hoba Remains to be World's Largest Meteorite
The Hoba remains the largest known and immediately accessible meteorite. However, thanks to remarkable advances in science and technology, it's possible that there are still additional meteorites with larger size and impact that haven't been found yet.
For example, Newsweek said geophysical techniques had been used to analyze and map the Chicxulub asteroid's impact crater in amazing detail. That's because the said space rock created numerous meteorites that wiped out the dinosaurs.
According to scientific theory, the impact may have caused material pieces to eject into the atmosphere, potentially leaving the planet and/or coming back as meteorites.
Several debris from the Chicxulub crater have fallen onto the Moon and the Earth, according to a 2008 report, and are awaiting identification as Chicxulubites.
Other meteorites are only nowadays coming to light. Recent evidence suggests that more than one asteroid may have been responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs was discovered on the Guinea Plateau of West Africa, according to a scientific report released this week by geoscientist Uisdean Nicholson and colleagues.
The Meteoritical Society also claims that roughly two-thirds of all meteorites on Earth have been discovered in Antarctica. They are challenging to get because they are compacted in ice, and experts believe that there are still many of them out there.
These meteorites are concentrated on the surface of ice sheets, and many end up in the ocean (known as blue ice). This may make them simple to retrieve under some circumstances. However, historically, finding them has been more difficult.
With up to 300,000 meteorites still present at the surface of the ice sheet, current artificial intelligence (AI) research has demonstrated that AI can detect roughly 83% of known meteorite-rich zones in Antarctica and many more ones that may yet be undiscovered.
However, Hoba remains to be the largest monolithic meteorite that has been found on Earth yet. Asteroid remnants that can be hidden deep inside impact craters that are known to be far larger than Hoba are among the numerous ones that might still be out there and waiting to be discovered.
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