Seymchan Meteorite — Otherworldly Polyhedral Sculpture

Now offered is the world’s largest geodesic extraterrestrial sculpture; it originates from the same Siberian meteorite shower as the previous lot. 

This specimen not only features a robust octahedral crystalline matrix associated with the very best Seymchan meteorites, it also boasts an additional geometric quality: the machined surface seen here is comprised of 720 triangular faces. 

This specimen was fashioned from a 125 kilogram (275 pound) Seymchan block — which had been cut from a half-ton meteorite — into the form now seen. The expert responsible for this feat is French artisan, mathematician and engineer Guy Le Berre who wrote a celebrated book on the history of polyhedra. Le Barre helped to write the code for the software that directed the complex machinery which carved this meteorite. Before the meteorite itself was machined, a test model using aluminum was first created.

This meteorite originates from the core of an asteroid that broke apart during early solar system history. Following pinball-like impacts in space, a portion was serendipitously bumped into an Earth-crossing orbit. Having arrived on Earth thousands of years ago, specimens of the Seymchan meteorite were first discovered in 1967 near the settlement of Seymchan in Siberia’s Magadan District.

Some Seymchan specimens feature discreet zoning of olivine from the asteroid’s mantle (see lots 104 and 117) while some consist entirely of the asteroid’s metallic core — as is the case with the specimen now offered. The metallic latticework seen is referred to as a Widmanstätten Pattern. It is the result of a slow cooling rate that provided sufficient time — millions of years — for two metallic alloys to orient into their crystalline habit. As the only place where this can happen is within differentiated asteroids, the vacuum of space (and theoretically within Earth’s own core), the appearance of this pattern is diagnostic in the identification of a meteorite. And this superlative example is worthy of having been machined into what is by far the largest extraterrestrial modern sculptural form of its kind.