BBC writes:
In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamen’s necklaces. The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilization. Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origin to unexplained chunks of glass scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert. Gemologically, this glass is termed crater glass.
But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it? An Austrian astochemist Christian Koeberl had established that the glass had been formed at a temperature so hot that there could be only one known cause: a meteorite impacting with earth. And yet there were no signs of an impact crater, even in satellite images. A natural airburst of that magnitude was unheard of until, in 1994, scientists watched as comet Shoemaker-Levy collided with Jupiter. It exploded in the Jovian atmosphere, and the Hubble telescope recorded the largest incandescent fireball ever witnessed rising over Jupiter’s horizon. Mark Boslough, who specializes in modeling large impacts n supercomputers, created a simulation of a similar impact on earth. The simulation revealed that an impactor could indeed generate a blistering atmospheric fireball, creating surface temperatures of 1800ºC, and leaving behind a field of glass. “What I want to emphasize is that it is hugely bigger in energy than the atomic tests,” says Boslough. “Ten thousand times more powerful.”
So that is what possibly created the yellow crater glass in King Tut’s pectoral.
More info @ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5196362.stm
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