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Our planet is bombarded with meteorites almost constantly. What’s a meteorite? Well, if you’ve ever watched the sky on a dark, clear night and seen the streak of a shooting star then you’ve seen a meteor. It’s a piece of space rock, or even dust, that lights up as it burns up while moving through our atmosphere. A meteorite is what we call the parts of meteors that make it through the atmosphere and land on the Earth. Big meteorites are few and far between (though there are YouTube videos of them hitting the ground, and sometimes even houses!), but tiny meteorites called micrometeorites hit the planet all the time. It’s pretty easy to find and gather these tiny little pieces of space rock. You can even do it in your own backyard!
Materials:
- A strong magnet
- Post-it Notes
- A magnifying glass or microscope
Process:
- Explore around your house to find places where a very fine dust has collected. Plain old dirt won’t work so you need to look for something very powdery. Places you might find this kind of dust are around downspouts and in the cracks of your sidewalk or driveway. If you have an adult and a ladder they can even check rain gutters and the roof for you.
- Once you’ve found some nice, powdery dust rub your magnet on it. The magnet will pick up some of it. Get as much as you can on your magnet. The more you get, the higher chance you’ll have of picking up some micrometeorites.
- Take your magnet inside and rub the dust off on the sticky part of a few Post-It Notes.
- Check out your dust under a magnifying glass or microscope. You’re looking for tiny little balls of shiny metal. They’ll come in different sizes but they’ll all be very small.
Summary:
You found space dust! Those micrometeorites used to be out in space until they passed through Earth’s atmosphere, landed in your yard, and then waited for you to gather them up and look at them. That’s pretty cool! They’re round because the meteors they were part of melted as they passed through the atmosphere and then reformed into balls or spheres, as they fell to the ground and became solid metal again. They collect on roofs and get washed down in the rain, which is why you can find them around downspouts and stuck in the cracks in sidewalks. Meteors are made of a combination of things, including rock and metal, and your tiny pieces are high in the metal iron, which is why they were attracted to your magnet.
Meteors go through Earth’s atmosphere pretty much all the time but a few times during the year they hit us much more frequently than normal. We call those times “meteor showers,” and they happen at regular times every year. This is because, as the Earth orbits the sun, it passes through places where a comet once passed, leaving some dust and rock from its tail as it did so. These fields of comet debris don’t move much so our planet passes through them about the same time each year. Whenever we do all kinds of dust and small rocks find their way into the atmosphere to burn up, leaving bright trails across the sky. If you go outside to a dark area, away from city lights, during one of these meteor showers you might see 50 or even 100 shooting stars an hour!
