When shaped into a sphere, Gibeon meteorites reveal in three dimensions their prominent crystalline fingerprint that is characteristic of these meteorites. Modern fashioning.

As the vast majority of iron meteorites are prosaically shaped, an opportunity exists to showcase their internal crystalline splendor by fashioning slices, cubes and spheres. Gibeon meteorites originated 4.5 billion years ago from the molten core of an asteroid located between Mars and Jupiter, whose shattered remains are part of the asteroid belt. An impact event ejected what was to become the Gibeon mass into interplanetary space where it traveled around the Sun for millions of years. Gibeon meteorites themselves are the bounty that was bestowed thousands of years ago when the wandering iron mass found itself in an Earth-crossing orbit. It slammed into Earth’s atmosphere before exploding and raining down in what is now the Kalahari Desert in Namibia.

As the crystalline structure seen does not appear in terrestrial iron ores, its presence is diagnostic for iron meteorites, and pattern variations are frequently indicative of different meteorites. This latticework, referred to as a Widmanstätten pattern, is a product of the intergrowth of two different iron-nickel minerals: kamacite (a low-nickel variety) and taenite (a high-nickel variety).

Christie's would like to thank Dr. Alan E. Rubin at the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles for his assistance in preparing this catalogue.
44.5 mm (1³⁄₄ in.) diameter
362g.

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