Chondritic meteorites come from asteroids that aren't quite large enough to have completely melted, but usually still large enough to cause some thermal alteration. The heat that was present might have made the chondrules sufficiently pliable that they squished into oval shapes due to the downward pressure from the material that was above it in its parent asteroid. Or, possibly the chondrules were already elongated but the pressure from above caused them to settle that way while the matrix was still soft.
Just throwing out ideas, Graham
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Graham Christensen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.geocities.com/aerolitehunter msn messenger: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
----- Original Message ----- From: "Darren Garrison" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 11:24 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Oriented chondrules?
(Sorry, last question of the night.)
Anyone know anything about "oriented" chondrules in a meteorite? I was looking at the scan of that
condrite that I had shown in the question about polishing (thanks to all who gave advise, by the
way) and noticed that, for objects in the matrix that are oblong, the long axises of a large
percentage of them seem to be aligned in a prefered direction rather than point in random
directions.
Here is the base image: http://webpages.charter.net/garrison6328/base_image.jpg
And one with arrows added to a few of the larger objects. Many other chondrules seem to tend to be
aligned in the same direction.
http://webpages.charter.net/garrison6328/flow_direction.jpg ______________________________________________ Meteorite-list mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/meteorite-list
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