{"id":851242,"date":"2026-08-11T08:52:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T08:52:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/851242\/"},"modified":"2026-08-11T08:52:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T08:52:13","slug":"flight-paths-and-fridge-magnets-how-a-fireball-hunter-tracked-down-new-zealands-newest-meteorite-new-zealand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/851242\/","title":{"rendered":"Flight paths and fridge magnets: how a fireball hunter tracked down New Zealand\u2019s newest meteorite | New Zealand"},"content":{"rendered":"

Days after a massive fireball flashed through New Zealand\u2019s skies last month<\/a>, Steve Wyn-Harris spotted a small, black stone on the bare ground. The citizen astronomer was on the hunt for debris from the meteor that had flown over the North Island. He bagged the rock but wasn\u2019t too confident, as he says most finds turn out to be \u201cmeteor-wrongs\u201d.<\/p>\n

But when he held the thumb-sized rock next to a fridge magnet, to detect iron and nickel in meteorites, it clicked. Wyn-Harris did the test on a video call with other citizen scientists and geologists and after the click \u201cwe were all yelling\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went from doubting Thomas to a convert,\u201d says Wyn-Harris.<\/p>\n

Steve Wyn-Harris on the hunt for fragments from July\u2019s meteor. Photograph: supplied by Fireballs Aotearoa<\/p>\n

His discovery marks the 11th confirmed meteorite to be found in New Zealand<\/a>. Meteorites are the leftover rock that hits the ground after the meteor has burned up entering Earth\u2019s atmosphere. Finding the debris in New Zealand can be difficult, a consequence of the country\u2019s sparsely populated, rugged terrain.<\/p>\n

Wyn-Harris is the director of Fireballs Aotearoa, an alliance of astronomers, geologists and citizen scientists that now has a network of 200 cameras set up around the country designed to help document meteor showers and recover meteorites.<\/p>\n

On 28 July, the group and their cameras had tracked a meteor over the North Island, and people had rushed online to describe the dazzling display and a \u201chuge boom\u201d.<\/p>\n

Footage indicated there was an exciting possibility of many fragments from the meteor on the ground. After crunching data, including wind speed and flight path projections, the group zeroed in on an area where they calculated meteorites could be strewn. They kept the location a secret, worried a public appeal for help could trigger a \u201cmeteor rush\u201d \u2013 a martian meteorite found in Niger sold for more than $5m last year<\/a> \u2013 though New Zealand law prohibits such sales.<\/p>\n

Wyn-Harris says he found the meteorite near a riverbank while scouting farmland a day before he and the group were due to search the area.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t so excited when I first spotted and bagged it because I\u2019d only been looking around \u2026 for 40 minutes,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

But on the video call later that night a geologist looked at the rock and noted its crust had a meteorite quality. The next day, a team of 11 people carried out a wider search of the area.<\/p>\n

PhD student Liam McGovern with one of four fragments found by Fireballs Aotearoa after a meteor blazed over New Zealand on 28 July. Photograph: supplied by Fireballs Aotearoa<\/p>\n

Two days after Wyn-Harris\u2019s discovery, which weighed eight grams, Liam McGovern, a geology PhD student, found a second fragment, weighing 39 grams. Over 10 days, the search party discovered four pieces, weighing 75g in total, including a fragment that had crashed on to the driveway of a house.<\/p>\n

Wyn-Harris says the meteor\u2019s trajectory before it entered the atmosphere indicated it came from the asteroid belt, making it an \u201cordinary chondrite\u201d. The name is \u201cunfortunate, because they\u2019re not ordinary,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

All four fragments will now be analysed further by Dr Marshall Palmer, a geologist who is part of Fireballs Aotearoa. Palmer will give the meteorites an official name and, together, they will become New Zealand\u2019s 11th documented meteorite.<\/p>\n

Prof James Scott, a geoscientist and the founder of Fireballs Aotearoa, says the pieces are \u201c100%\u201d meteorite, and he believes they likely share origins with New Zealand\u2019s first meteorite discovered in 1863 nearby in Masterton.<\/p>\n

\u201cBoth likely come from the same parent body, which was an asteroid from near the start of the solar system. That blows my mind. We have two rocks, formed elsewhere in space from a smallish asteroid \u2026 that has been catastrophically destroyed, and yet they land within 10km of each other.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Days after a massive fireball flashed through New Zealand\u2019s skies last month, Steve Wyn-Harris spotted a small, black…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":851243,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-851242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=851242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/851242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/851243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=851242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=851242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=851242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}