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Gibeon (meteorite)
Gibeon is a meteorite that fell in prehistoric times in Namibia. It was named after the nearest town: Gibeon. History The meteorite was discovered by the Nama people and used by them to make tools and weapons. In 1836 the English captain J. E. Alexander collected samples of the meteorite in the vicinity of the Fish River and sent them to London. There John Herschel analyzed them and confirmed for the first time the extraterrestrial nature of the material. Between 1911 and 1913, 33 fragments of the meteorite were collected in the vicinity of Gibeon and brought to the capital Windhoek. They weighed between and were first stored, then displayed at Zoo Park as a single heap. In 1975 a public fountain displaying the meteorite fragments was planned. The pieces were removed and stored at Alte Feste, where two of the fragments were stolen. The fountain was erected in Post Street Mall, with two empty pillars for the missing fragments. Since then, two more fragments were removed fro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Windhoek
Windhoek (, , ) is the capital and largest city of Namibia. It is located in central Namibia in the Khomas Highland plateau area, at around above sea level, almost exactly at the country's geographical centre. The population of Windhoek in 2020 was 431,000 which is growing continually due to an influx from all over Namibia. Windhoek is the social, economic, political, and cultural centre of the country. Nearly every Namibian national enterprise, governmental body, educational and cultural institution is headquartered there. The city developed at the site of a permanent hot spring known to the indigenous pastoral communities. It developed rapidly after Jonker Afrikaner, Captain of the Orlam, settled there in 1840 and built a stone church for his community. In the decades following, multiple wars and armed hostilities resulted in the neglect and destruction of the new settlement. Windhoek was founded a second time in 1890 by Imperial German Army Major Curt von François, whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Herschel
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet (; 7 March 1792 – 11 May 1871) was an English polymath active as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor, experimental photographer who invented the blueprint and did botanical work. Herschel originated the use of the Julian day system in astronomy. He named seven moons of Saturn and four moons of Uranus – the seventh planet, discovered by his father Sir William Herschel. He made many contributions to the science of photography, and investigated colour blindness and the chemical power of ultraviolet rays. His ''Preliminary Discourse'' (1831), which advocated an inductive approach to scientific experiment and theory-building, was an important contribution to the philosophy of science. Early life and work on astronomy Herschel was born in Slough, Buckinghamshire, the son of Mary Baldwin and astronomer William Herschel. He was the nephew of astronomer Caroline Herschel. He studied shortly at Eton College an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Widmanstätten Pattern
Widmanstätten patterns, also known as Thomson structures, are figures of long nickel–iron crystals, found in the octahedrite iron meteorites and some pallasites. They consist of a fine interleaving of kamacite and taenite bands or ribbons called ''lamellae''. Commonly, in gaps between the lamellae, a fine-grained mixture of kamacite and taenite called plessite can be found. Widmanstätten patterns describe features in modern steels, titanium, and zirconium alloys. Discovery In 1808, these figures were observed by Count Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten, the director of the Imperial Porcelain works in Vienna. While flame heating iron meteorites, Widmanstätten noticed color and luster zone differentiation as the various iron alloys oxidized at different rates. He did not publish his findings, claiming them only via oral communication with his colleagues. The discovery was acknowledged by Carl von Schreibers, director of the Vienna Mineral and Zoology Cabinet, who named the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phosphorus
Phosphorus is a chemical element with the symbol P and atomic number 15. Elemental phosphorus exists in two major forms, white phosphorus and red phosphorus, but because it is highly reactive, phosphorus is never found as a free element on Earth. It has a concentration in the Earth's crust of about one gram per kilogram (compare copper at about 0.06 grams). In minerals, phosphorus generally occurs as phosphate. Elemental phosphorus was first isolated as white phosphorus in 1669. White phosphorus emits a faint glow when exposed to oxygen – hence the name, taken from Greek mythology, meaning 'light-bearer' (Latin ), referring to the " Morning Star", the planet Venus. The term '' phosphorescence'', meaning glow after illumination, derives from this property of phosphorus, although the word has since been used for a different physical process that produces a glow. The glow of phosphorus is caused by oxidation of the white (but not red) phosphorus — a process now called chem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cobalt
Cobalt is a chemical element with the symbol Co and atomic number 27. As with nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in a chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, silver-gray metal. Cobalt-based blue pigments ( cobalt blue) have been used since ancient times for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass, but the color was for a long time thought to be due to the known metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name ''kobold ore'' (German for ''goblin ore'') for some of the blue-pigment-producing minerals; they were so named because they were poor in known metals, and gave poisonous arsenic-containing fumes when smelted. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), and this was ultimately named for the ''kobold''. Today, some cobalt is produced specifically from one of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nickel
Nickel is a chemical element with symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel is a hard and ductile transition metal. Pure nickel is chemically reactive but large pieces are slow to react with air under standard conditions because a passivation layer of nickel oxide forms on the surface that prevents further corrosion. Even so, pure native nickel is found in Earth's crust only in tiny amounts, usually in ultramafic rocks, and in the interiors of larger nickel–iron meteorites that were not exposed to oxygen when outside Earth's atmosphere. Meteoric nickel is found in combination with iron, a reflection of the origin of those elements as major end products of supernova nucleosynthesis. An iron–nickel mixture is thought to compose Earth's outer and inner cores. Use of nickel (as natural meteoric nickel–iron alloy) has been traced as far back as 3500 BCE. Nickel was first isolated and classified as an e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iron
Iron () is a chemical element with symbol Fe (from la, ferrum) and atomic number 26. It is a metal that belongs to the first transition series and group 8 of the periodic table. It is, by mass, the most common element on Earth, right in front of oxygen (32.1% and 30.1%, respectively), forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust. In its metallic state, iron is rare in the Earth's crust, limited mainly to deposition by meteorites. Iron ores, by contrast, are among the most abundant in the Earth's crust, although extracting usable metal from them requires kilns or furnaces capable of reaching or higher, about higher than that required to smelt copper. Humans started to master that process in Eurasia during the 2nd millennium BCE and the use of iron tools and weapons began to displace copper alloys, in some regions, only around 1200 BCE. That event is considered the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iron Meteorite
Iron meteorites, also known as siderites, or ferrous meteorites, are a type of meteorite that consist overwhelmingly of an iron–nickel alloy known as meteoric iron that usually consists of two mineral phases: kamacite and taenite. Most iron meteorites originate from cores of planetesimals, with the exception of the IIE iron meteorite group The iron found in iron meteorites was one of the earliest sources of usable iron available to humans, due to the malleability and ductility of the meteoric iron, before the development of smelting that signaled the beginning of the Iron Age. Occurrence Although they are fairly rare compared to the stony meteorites, comprising only about 5.7% of witnessed falls, iron meteorites have historically been heavily over-represented in meteorite collections. This is due to several factors: * They are easily recognized as unusual even by laymen, as opposed to stony meteorites. Modern-day searches for meteorites in deserts and Antarctica yield a muc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gibeon Meteorite, NMNH
Gibeon ( he, גִּבְעוֹן ''giḇʻôn, giv'ôn'') may refer to: * Gibeon (ancient city), a Canaanite city north of Jerusalem that was conquered by Joshua * Gibeon Constituency, the constituency whose administrative centre is the Namibian village of Gibeon * Gibeon (meteorite), an iron meteorite found in Namibia near Gibeon * Gibeon, Namibia, a village in the Hardap region of Namibia ** Gibeon Railway Station, a railway station serving the town of Gibeon in Namibia * Gibeon Bradbury (1833–1904), painter from Buxton, Maine, United States * Giv'on HaHadashah ( he, גִּבְעוֹן הַחֲדָשָׁה), an Israeli communal settlement northwest of Jerusalem * Thomas Givon Thomas Givon (also known as Talmy Givón) (born June 22, 1936) is a linguist and writer. He is one of the founders of "West Coast Functionalism", today classified as a usage-based model of language, and of the linguistics department at the Unive ... (born 1936), he, Talmy Givón, linguist, rancher, musi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hardap Region
Hardap is one of the fourteen regions of Namibia, its capital is Mariental. Hardap contains the municipality of Mariental, the towns Rehoboth and Aranos, and the self-governed villages Gibeon, Gochas, Kalkrand, Stampriet and Maltahöhe. It is home to the Hardap Dam. Hardap stretches the entire width of Namibia, from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to Namibia's eastern national border. In the northeast, it borders the Kgalagadi District of Botswana, and in the southeast, it borders the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. Domestically, it borders the following regions: *Erongo – northwest *Khomas – north central *Omaheke – northeast * ǁKaras – south Politics As of 2020, Hardap had 52,534 registered voters. The region comprises eight political constituencies: * Gibeon * Mariental Rural * Mariental Urban * Rehoboth Rural * Rehoboth Urban East * Rehoboth Urban West * Aranos (created in 2013) * Daweb (created in 2013) As in all other regions, SWAPO was by far the st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Strewn Field
The term strewn field indicates the area where meteorites from a single fall are dispersed. It is also often used for the area containing tektites produced by large meteorite impact.''Tektites in the geological record: showers of glass from the sky''. Gerald Joseph Home McCall. Geological Society of London, 2001page 10/ref> Formation There are two strewnfield formation mechanisms: # Mid-air fragmentation: when a large meteoroid enters the atmosphere it often fragments into many pieces before touching the ground due to thermal shock. This mid-air explosion disperses material over a large oval-shaped area. The long axis of this oval is along the flight path of the meteoroid. When multiple-explosions occur, the material can be found in several overlapping ovals. # Impact fragmentation: when there is almost no mid-air fragmentation the fragmentation can occur upon impact. In this case the strewnfield shape can be different, usually circular. (e.g. Canyon Diablo at Meteor Crater; Austra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Windhoek Central Business District
Windhoek Central Business District (short: ''Windhoek Central'') is the inner city area of Windhoek, capital of Namibia. It is surrounded by the suburbs of Windhoek West and Hochland Park in the west, Windhoek-North in the north, Eros, Klein-Windhoek, Luxushügel and Auasblick in the east, and Suiderhof and Southern Industrial in the south. Windhoek Central consists of residential and business properties as well as public spaces. Most of Windhoek's governmental and administrative buildings are situated here. The name addition ''Business District'' refers to the possibility to apply for business rights which is generally granted for erven in Windhoek that are situated in any proclaimed business district. Important buildings, roads and places * Independence Avenue * Alte Feste * Christ Church * St. Mary's Cathedral * Zoo Park Zoo Park is a public park on Independence Avenue in downtown Windhoek, Namibia. It is also a focal point of social life in the city [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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