Testing the damage hand magnets used by amateurs do to meteorites

A pair of Earth, atmospheric and planetary scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown how the magnetic field of a meteorite can be damaged by amateur collectors using hand magnets. In their paper published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, Foteini Vervelidou and Benjamin Weiss describe how they tested the impact on the magnetic field of terrestrial basalt—as a stand in for meteorites—when it is exposed to hand magnets and what they learned by doing so.