A related question I pondered a while back: How big does an object
need to be to be a 'parent body'? Is the meteorite ever the full
remnant of the PB?
In other words, can something be big and coherent enough to survive
passage through the atmosphere and produce a meteorite, which hasn't
previously been part of a much larger body?
My (rather ill-educated) guess would be that candidates would be very
primitive and undifferentiated, with a very pretty low density.
Mark
Quoting Jeff Grossman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Alan Rubin and I grappled with this issue in our article in Meteorite!
10 years ago, "What is a meteorite? The pursuit of a comprehensive
definition." We wanted a definition that would exclude things like
tektites from being called meteorites. Our definition then said that,
to be called a meteorite, an object had to escape the dominant
gravitational influence of its parent body.
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