How are meteorites named?
Meteorites are named after the place where they fell or were found, usually a nearby town or geographical feature. Where many are found in one area, such as parts of Antarctica or the Sahara, the place name is followed by a number.
Every meteorite recognised by science gets a unique official name, approved by the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society, the international body for meteorite research. The basic rule is simple: name it after the place. Allende is a village in Mexico, Murchison a town in Victoria, Australia, and Winchcombe a town in Gloucestershire. The chosen name should be a feature that is easy to find on a map and unlikely to change, such as a settlement, river or mountain.
That works well for isolated falls and finds, but not for regions that yield meteorites by the hundred. In these dense collection areas each meteorite receives the area name plus a number. In Antarctica the number encodes the year the expedition season began and the order of collection: ALH 84001 was the first specimen catalogued from the Allan Hills collected in the 1984–85 season. Desert areas such as Dar al Gani in Libya use a running number instead, as does the Northwest Africa (NWA) series for Saharan stones of uncertain origin.
Names are never reused, and every fragment from a single fall shares one name, however widely the pieces are scattered. The Sikhote-Alin iron shower of 1947 left thousands of fragments in the Russian Far East, yet they are all simply Sikhote-Alin. Spelling follows the local form where practical, which is why you meet names such as Bjurböle from Finland and Košice from Slovakia.
Before a name is approved, a specialist laboratory must classify the meteorite and a sample must be lodged in a recognised collection. Only then does the name enter the official record. Dealers sometimes use informal nicknames, but the approved name is the one that counts.