/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>12666136
>>12664677

But even more interesting than a galvanized pail is what happens in meteorites. The metal in iron meteorites started out as metal dust flying around the early Sun, in the nebula from which our solar system coalesced. These specks of dust collided with one another at thousands of miles per second, eventually creating little blobs of molten metal that acted as traps for further grains of dust. This resulted in large globs of very hot liquid metal. These globs cooled under weightless conditions for tens of millions of years. The fabulously slow solidification of the meteorite not only produces gigantic crystals, some upward of a meter long, but bizarre interpenetrating grain boundaries that are metallurgically impossible to create in the gravity present everywhere on Earth's surface.

Meteoritic metal, incidentally, was probably crucial to humanity's metallurgical progress. Because of this extremely slow cooling in space and the highly interlocked grain boundaries that result, meteoritic iron is quite tough and suitable for tools. There is evidence that ancient cultures as disparate as the Mesopotamians, Inuits, Indonesians and Maya all made axes and knives from this metal. King Tut was found with a meteoritic dagger and an axe made out of 'a stone from heaven' is described as one of Gilgamesh's royal attributes. It would be a long time after these meteoritic tools were made that we learned how to produce iron of equivalent quality from ores found on Earth, but it seems likely that (in some places) meteoritic tools were what early smiths were attempting to recreate.