A shower of stones, of meteoric origin, that fell near the village of Orgueil, near Toulouse in the south of France, on the night of May 14, 1864. The stones were of the carbonaceous chondrite type, and about 20 were collected for examination. They were found to contain hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen in a material that was like peat and lignite organic substances that occur naturally on Earth. How such substances came to be in this meteorite (and are also found in other carbonaceous chondrite meteorites) is still a puzzle.<\/p>\n
So far there is nothing in the above to single out the Orgueil meteorite from the thousands of others that have fallen on Earth. Its importance is twofold. First, at that time Louis Pasteur had started a furious debate in France by disproving the current belief that life can arise from inanimate matter: Spontaneous Generation. One version of this was that microbes entered Earth\u2019s atmosphere in meteorites and when given the right conditions developed into different organisms. Careful examination of several of the fragments failed to find any microbes. The idea that microbes enter our atmosphere from space has persisted nevertheless and has recurred several times in this century. Lord Kelvin supported the idea as did two Swedish scientists Svante Arrhenius and Louis Bachman. Another Swedish professor, Knut Emil Landmark, favored the meteorite theory, and University of California professor Charles B. Lipman claimed to have cultured microbes from pulverized meteoritic material. That experiment has eluded repetition, and his cultures are thought to have been the result of inadequate sterilization. More recently still, Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, eminent astrophysicists, promoted the theory of invasion of Earth by bacteria from outer space, which again failed to stand up to scrutiny.<\/p>\n
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A shower of stones, of meteoric origin, that fell near the village of Orgueil, near Toulouse in the south of France, on the night of May 14, 1864. The stones were of the carbonaceous chondrite type, and about 20 were collected for examination. They were found to contain hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen in a material […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-o"],"yoast_head":"\n