Red Cabbage Palms, Palm Valley, NT. Credit: Cgoodwin

By Rich Bowden:

An Australian-based researcher has made history by using ancient Aboriginal Dreamtime legends to locate a meteorite crater in the Northern Territory.

US scientist Duane Hamacher arrived in Australia having researched astrophysics but has been pursuing his PhD at the university for the last year studying Aboriginal astronomy within the Macquarie University‘s Department of Indigenous Studies.

A University release said he had been rewarded by studying local legends of cosmic impacts.

He has spent the last year investigating Aboriginal perceptions of comets, meteors and cosmic impacts in collaboration with Professor Ray Norris from the CSIRO.

He began looking at all the places described in Aboriginal stories as having stars or stones falling from the sky and striking the ground.

“There were numerous examples and some of them very closely parallel the scientific understanding of a meteorite impact, sometimes citing a location. I also decided to look at known impact craters in Australia and see if they had associated Dreaming stories that attributed their origins to cosmic impacts – and some did,” he said.

Using Google Maps to locate the impacts, Hamacher found a crater in the Northern Territory’s Palm Valley which he had located from local Indigenous Arrernte Dreaming story of a star that fell to a place called Puka.

“The geophysical data shows the structure is bowl-shaped under the surface. There is no other way to explain the structure’s morphology than as a cosmic impact. It couldn’t have been erosion and there is no volcanic activity in the area,” Hamacher said in the news release.

The team’s findings will be published in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science in February 2010.

Tags: aboriginal dreaming, macquarie university, meteorites