Passage I

King Tut's Space Bug

Among the treasures found in Pharaoh Tutankhamen's tomb, in the 1920s one diminutive ornament poses a mystery that spans the ages. The "pectoral," a kind of jewelry worn on one's chest depicts Egyptian symbols with gold and gems. Most strikingly, at the piece's center is a beetle carved from an ethereal yellow-green material.

[1] Originally, archaeologists identified the beetle as chalcedony, a quartz gemstone. [2] In 1996, likewise, mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele noticed the beetle at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and suspected it wasn't chalcedony. [3] After studying the beetle, he determined it to be 28.5-million-year-old glass. [4] De Michele then traced the glass to the Great Sand Sea of western Egypt, where pieces of it lay strewn across 6,500 square kilometers. [5] Glass is made by heating substances, such as, sand. [6] Though lava and lightning strikes can create glass the desert glass's traces of the elements iridium and osmium pointed to an unearthly culprit: a meteoroid. [7] It's true that the tremendous heat and pressure around the globe of meteorite impacts in many places have created glass. [8] But meteorites leave craters, and their was no crater that could account for the desert glass. (9)

In recent years, scientists John Wasson and Mark Boslough have put their research-whiz brains to work on a new explanation for the desert glass. Intrigued by the 1994 collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter and a 1908 meteoroid airburst over a remote region of Russia that flattened 80 million trees but left no crater, they ran sophisticated computer simulations. Their conclusion: a meteoroid burned up in the atmosphere, but its fireball reached Earth and scorched an expanse of sandstone to temperatures above 1,800°C. (13)

Imagination can take the story through there. Some three thousand years ago, an artisan admired a piece of desert glass; so gorgeous that, with a little carving, it would befit a great pharaoh.