The Meteoritic Mirrors of Matthew Luck Galpin

The Artist's workshop | Companion objects | Other meteorites on display

Anvilled stars: a mirror made from an iron meteorite by Matthew Luck Galpin

Reflecting ourselves and the universe around us, mirrors can take many forms and they are vital components in many of the telescopes which astronomers have used to explore and understand the Universe. Artist Matthew Luck Galpin uses his blacksmithing skills to rework meteorites by heating, hammering, grinding and polishing them into mirrors called ‘Anvilled Stars’.

This process echoes the formation of the planets, pulled together and shaped by gravity, heat and rotation. The meteorites themselves formed when the Solar System was young; they are the left-over remnants of the material from which the planets were made, the building blocks of the Earth and everything on it.

Starting their unimaginable journey as part of the asteroid belt the meteorites fell to Earth after travelling for thousands of millions of years through heat and cold, light and darkness. Their fiery descent over the desert of northern Argentina sometime between 4000 and 6000 years ago was witnessed by the local people in the place now called the Field of Heaven or Campo Del Cielo. Now these meteorites have begun a new stage in their journey, as manufactured objects shaped and altered in the artist’s workshop.

A constellation of six meteoritic mirrors has been placed around the Royal Observatory, side by side with objects and instruments which have played a key role in our search for knowledge and wonder in the Universe. The Anvilled Stars have previously been on display at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford and at the Science Museum in London, creating an extended ‘constellation’ spread across time as well as space.

The Artist's workshop

These short films illustrate the creation of the Anvilled Stars in the artist’s workshop. Rather than a demonstration of craft skill this is intended to be a poetic process which evokes the origin of the meteorites themselves. The heating, grinding and hammering echo the heat, rotation and gravity which shaped the early Solar System.

Companion objects

Matthew Luck Galpin’s Anvilled Stars are on display in Flamsteed House, the Meridian Building and the Astronomy Centre next to objects and instruments which have played a key role in our quest to understand the Universe. These objects have helped the human imagination to reach out into space, while the meteoritic mirrors have themselves travelled to us from that vast realm. The viewer is invited to reflect on our place in the Universe and our efforts to make sense of it.

Flamsteed House, Time and Longitude gallery: a mirror is placed between two historic models of the Solar System which between them embody our changing view of the cosmos. The first model shows the Earth at the centre of everything but in the second the Earth has been displaced and becomes just another planet orbiting around the Sun. Another mirror is displayed beside a copy of the comprehensive Star Catalogue produced by John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal at Greenwich.

Grand Orrery, 1780Meridian Building, Halley’s Quadrant Room: one of the Anvilled Stars is displayed alongside a selection of Mirrors and Lenses from various telescopes. Their precise optical configurations and polished surfaces contrast with the irregular shape of the meteoritic mirror.

Astronomy Centre, Astronomy Inspires gallery: an Anvilled Star shares a display case with an 18th Century Grand Orrery, a working model of the Solar System showing the orbits of the planets.

Astronomy Centre, Astronomy Questions gallery: in the display case Why do we study the stars? a meteoritic mirror is juxtaposed with the high-precision flight-spare mirror from the Hipparcos spacecraft, which measured the positions of thousands of stars. In the What is the Universe? display another mirror shares a case with the telescope eyepieces through which astronomer William Herschel first discovered the planet Uranus in 1781 and a copy of Isaac Newton’s Principia, the work in which the mathematician set out his theory of gravitation.

Other meteorites on display at the Royal Observatory Greenwich

Large piece of Gibeon meteorite, on loan courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. Meteorites are usually named after the place where they fell to Earth and they come in many shapes and sizes, and with different compositions. Each type tells us something different about the birth of the Solar System and the formation of the planets. Several meteorite samples are on display in the Royal Observatory’s Astronomy Centre, on generous loan from London’s Natural History Museum, one of the leading centres in the world for the study of meteorites.

Canyon Diablo meteorite specimen, on loan courtesy of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. The Anvilled Stars are made from the nickel-iron Campo del Cielo meteorites. They are metallic chunks from the core of a would-be planet which was smashed apart by a collision during the chaos of the early Solar System 4.5 billion years ago. There are two similar meteorites on display in the Astronomy Centre: Canyon Diablo, discovered in Arizona, and Gibeon, found in Namibia.

Both have been sliced and chemically etched to reveal the distinctive ‘Widmanstätten patterns’: beautiful criss-crossing arrangements of crystallised alloys which formed as the metal cooled over millions of years. This unique structure makes meteoritic metal behave very differently from earthly metal in the blacksmith’s forge, contributing to the distinctive properties and shapes of Matthew Luck Galpin’s Anvilled Stars.

Another fragment from deep within a forming planet is the Esquel meteorite, which was found in Argentina. The sample on display has been sliced and polished, revealing yellow crystals of the mineral olivine embedded in a mixture of iron and nickel. It comes from the core-mantle boundary of another smashed-up planet where metal and rock was mixed together.

Two other meteorites on display have very different origins. The Barwell meteorite fell in Leicestershire on Christmas Eve 1965 causing minor damage to buildings and property, while Allende fell as a fireball over northern Mexico on 8 February 1969. They are both chondrites, primitive meteorites which were never incorporated into a larger asteroid or planet. They preserve some of the original material from which the Solar System was made.

Perhaps most unusual of all is a small fragment of the Nakhla meteorite which fell in Egypt on the 28th of June 1911. Chemical analysis reveals that this is a piece of rock from the planet Mars, blasted into space by an asteroid impact millions of years ago. It is perhaps the closest most of us will ever get to the Red Planet itself. The Nakhla meteorite was the subject of this edition of BBC Radio 4’s Frontiers programme, presented by the Royal Observatory’s Public Astronomer Marek Kukula and first broadcast in June 2011.