Wold Cottage meteorite

The Wold Cottage meteorite, which fell in 1795 near Wold Cottage farm, Yorkshire, was the first recorded meteorite fall in the UK.

Its discovery helped confirm that meteorites come from space. Previously, many people believed that rocks that fell from the sky had been ejected into the air by nearby volcanoes - but there are no active volcanoes in Yorkshire.

This prompted scientist Joseph Banks to investigate. He commissioned a worldwide comparison of these stones from the sky and found them to be similar to each other but not to rocks on Earth.

This helped ignite scholarly interest in meteorites and their origins, eventually leading to the development of meteoritics as a discipline.

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