King Tut Wore Ancient, Meteor-Blasted Yellow Glass
King Tut Wore Ancient, Meteor-Blasted Yellow Glass
By Yasemin Saplakoglu, Staff Writer | May 17, 2019 02:19pm ET
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King tut's pectoral contained pieces of glass formed by a meteorite impact.
Credit: Shutterstock
About 29 million years ago, the sands of the western Egyptian desert melted and created tiny pieces of canary yellow glass — some of which ended up decorating King Tut's pectoral (chest ornament).
This natural glass, found across thousands of square kilometers in western Egypt, is thought to have originated from one of two events: either a meteorite impact on the surface of Earth or an airburst, an explosion that happens when a space rock enters our planet's atmosphere. [Photos: Giant Spiral Grows Out of Egypt's Desert]
A new study suggests it's the former. The glass once contained pieces of a rare "shocked" mineral called reidite, which forms only during a meteorite impact, researchers from Australia and Austria reported May 2 in the journal Geology.
The heat created by either the meteorite impacts or an airburst would have been enough to liquefy the sand in the desert, creating the glass particles. But while airbursts create shock waves up in the air that can be thousands of pascals (a unit of pressure), asteroid impacts cause shock waves of billions of pascals on the ground, the researchers wrote. (In other words, meteorite impacts create shock waves that have millions of times more pressure than those created by airbursts.)
More:
https://www.livescience.com/65503-glass-egypt-desert-meteorite-impact.html