Tutankhamun’s Fireball
Tutankhamun’s Fireball
Yellow-green glass carved into a beetle-shaped ornament and found on a necklace worn by the ancient King Tutankhamen was created by a meteorite fireball, according to new research. The carving is known as a scarab, which are ancient Egyptian fertility symbols shaped like dung beetles. In 1999, Italian geologists performed a chemical composition test on Tut’s scarab, which is the centerpiece of a colorful necklace that archaeologist Howard Carter found in King Tut’s Valley of the Kings’ tomb in Luxor.
The geologists determined the scarab was made out of natural desert glass for the king, who reigned from 1333 to 1323 B.C. Such glass is only found in the Great Sand Sea of the eastern Sahara desert. With a silica content of 98 percent, it is the purest known glass in the world. The desert region, located 500 miles southwest of Cairo, yields this glass in a remote 49.7 by 15.5 rectangular area.
A 390-foot-wide asteroid traveling at 12.4 miles per second likely broke up in Earth’s atmosphere around 30 million years ago, when the glass formed. After the meteorite broke up in Earth¹s atmosphere, the temperature of the resulting fireball would have been as hot as the sun’s surface. Like a blowtorch melting wax, the heat would have melted sand and sandstone into thin layers, which, when cooled, resulted in glass that later was blown into piles across the desert.
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