The L'Aigle strewn field
The first strewn field ever mapped, which helped persuade scientists that stones really do fall from the sky.
Key facts
- Fell
- 26 April 1803, about 1 in the afternoon
- Where
- around L'Aigle, Normandy, France
- Recovered
- about 37 kilograms in some 3,000 stones
- Field
- an oval about 10 kilometres long and 4 kilometres wide
- Type
- Ordinary chondrite, L6
The fall
In broad daylight, people across a district of Normandy heard explosions and a rattling hiss as stones fell on farms and villages, some still warm.
The ellipse
The young physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot, sent by the government to investigate, interviewed witnesses and plotted where stones had been found. They lay within an oval about 10 kilometres long and 4 wide, aligned with the fireball's path. It was the first strewn field ever mapped, and its shape was powerful evidence that the stones had come from a single object in the sky.
Where the big and small pieces landed
About 3,000 stones were collected, weighing about 37 kilograms in all. Biot noted that the largest lay at one end of the oval and the smallest at the other, an early record of mass sorting. The heaviest stone weighed around 9 kilograms.
The law
France has no law written for meteorites, and court decisions on ownership have gone both ways between landowner and finder.
Related pages
Glossary: Strewn field, Strewn field map, Fusion crust, Meteorite ownership