Word: kohman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Kohman rejects both these theories. He analyzed tektites and found that they contain considerable amounts of radioactive isotopes (beryllium 10 and aluminum 26) that are formed by cosmic rays in space. This rules out the moon, he says. If tektites were splashed out of lunar meteor craters, they would have to come from at least a small distance below the moon's surface, where they would be sheltered from rays...
Scattered thinly over the earth's surface are large patches of tektites-glassy lumps up to several inches across, of mysterious and probably unearthly origin. In Britain's Nature, American Chemist Truman P. Kohman, writing from West Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, argues that tektites must come from outside the solar system...
...tektites be meteorites that moved on orbits in the solar system, says Kohman. The fragments of single stony meteorites could not cover large areas of the earth's surface, such as the tektite patches splattered over big parts of Texas, Libya and Australia. And it is easy to show, he says, that if they belonged to a loose swarm of small objects in the solar system (e.g., disrupted comets), the gravitational pulls of the sun and its planets would have spread them wider than the diameter of the earth. So they could not fall in any kind of patch...
...Kohman therefore argues that tektites must come from foreign stars. During their long journeys through interstellar space, the feeble gravitational attraction between individual particles would have plenty of time to bring them all together in a tight cluster, like a bagful of marbles. As the cluster shoots into the solar system, it will, under the Kohman hypothesis, feel various gravitational pulls and will start to open, but its particles will not have time to scatter very widely before they hit the earth...
...check this theory, Dr. Kohman suggests, is more thorough analysis of tektites. Tektites that came from a stellar system much younger than the solar system should, for example, contain traces of short-lived elements (e.g., plutonium 244 and curium 247) that have long been extinct on earth...