I once found a meteorite in a stream bed when I was a kid. I suspected it might be a meteorite and living a few blocks from Bradley college, I decided to bring it in and have them give it a look see, and they confirmed my suspicions. About a year later I was cleaning up one of my neighbor's yards for a few dollars, when I found another piece that looked almost exactly like it. I brought it home and put it against my other meteorite and my mind was blown as I saw that the 2 pieces fit together almost exactly. A few pieces were missing, but it was obvious that at one time they were together.
I often discuss astronomy with one of my lecturers. He's an avid amateur astronomer, and once bought a piece of a mars meteorite found in Morocco. It's only the size of a pebble, but it's worth 800 dollars. I've had the opportunity to hold it in my hands, and it felt so weird, holding a piece of a world millions of kilometers away that we haven't yet seen with our own eyes. You could see with which side it entered the atmosphere and you could see the slight hint of red inside as well. Really interesting and special!
that seems very very cheap. Only 227 of 73,000 classified meteorites are thought to be from mars. I have held soil samples collected during the 1969 moon landings though!
Actually it's even more mind blowing. Most of our matter was created in collisions of neutron stars! Check out PBS Space Time: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MmgMboWunkI.html
I have a nice meteor here on my desk right now.. also when I was a lad in the late 50's we used to use the magnet out of phones to collect the iron in the soil in colorado because a teacher told us they might be small meteors.. that was the 2nd grade.. I do not know what happened to my collection from back then.. But wish I still had it today.. This was a good one guys.. I am gonna go collect iron like I did then as soon as spring arrives and the mud turns back to dirt.. Carry on..
@@googleeatsdicks well no ... just a little hot still.. actually it is very cool.. the whole story of finding it is strange to.. But that is for another place..
@@googleeatsdicks oh you party pooper! But you are right.. I think that is what he was getting at when he said that it was bright.. Well it maybe bright but it is a proven fact that I am no long as such.. and that I keep rocks on my desk.. Well now the world knows.. I am a not so brite rock collector..
@@googleeatsdicks Well I think so!.. in my limited capacity as an old fart.. But I have collected rock since I was a sprout.. It has paid off a few times for sure.. But the joy of doing it is tremendous if you are in the arizona or nevada area I still have some old hand made maps I would be willing to share with you.. I can no longer get down there anymore.. the gold and silver deposits I can not send because they are owned by individuals now and I have made agreement's But other rocks are to be had some very pretty and some semi precious..
if you wanna find actual meteorites then glaciers and deserts are your best bet. Look for dark objects. Go to a desert, find a large area of erosional desert pavement and you are relatively likely to find one. Happy hunting.
The urban micrometeorite guys name is Jon Larsen. He recently published a coffeetable book under the same Project Stardust name, full of beautiful microphotographs, as well as a guide on collection.
I use 4 neodymium magnets attached to a steel edging stake screwed to end of a long stick. I look in large parking lots close to the curbs, driveways, downspouts..... I've been looking a good year and have probably found around 30 plus a small meteorite. I do have a inexpensive digital screen microscope which helps, but once you know what your looking for you can see them stuck on your magnet. It's pretty cool when you find them. Got my neodymium magnets on Ebay. Happy hunting.
when I was in fourth or fifth grade my teacher had the class do an experiment where we collected rainwater to search for micro meteorites. I don't remember the whole process but in the end no one found anything. Still a nice memory though
There's a meteorite observation system outside of Oslo that calculate the orbit and crash sites of pretty much all (visible) meteorites flying over the southern half of Norway. I've been to a lot of these approximately crash sites and I've found 4 meteorites so far!
That is awesome. There is something similar available for the UK (fireball) that uses things like doorbell cameras and CCTV to locate meteorites. Infact the recent CI-type found in Gloucester was located using this network (by my MSc supervisor XD).
You know, I once lived in a semi-rural area and one day I was playing around with an old car speaker. I was trying to get the magnet off it and accidentally dropped it on the ground a few times. Well, I then noticed something strange. Where it had hit the ground, it had a few little metal balls. I collected them and then used the magnet over about a square meter of area rubbing it through the soil and ended up with a lot of these little metal balls. At the time I was still in high school so I took them to my science teacher to see if he knew what they were. He told me he wasn't sure. Now, I think they might have been micrometeorites, but my question is, why were there so many of them. In a square meter of area only an inch deep there were hundreds of these little metal balls of various sizes.
i have a little piece of meteorite its a campo cielo from south america and its really nice but I would love to go to a desert or salt flats or w/e and find one that would be amazing
Fun fact: the scientist publishing the paper mentioned has been a jazz guitarist most of his life. He's playing lead guitar in this clip: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-wAh77i3aH-I.html He retired last year to spend more time doing research on micrometeorites.
yeah, I saw that article and tried it myself.... the roof shingles were coated with a grit that seemed to all be magnetic.... so yeah, it all stuck to the magnet... which sucks because I have a usb digi microscope i wanted to use
Matthew Sermons, try checking someone else’s gutters, especially if they have a sheet metal roof, which tiny objects won’t stick to. There may be tiny, magnetic bits of roof in the dust, but they won’t be rounded and glassy.
how often does the average person get hit by one of these falling from space? I wonder if people get hit and just scratch it like a bug bite or something.
I'm curious as to why various elements forged in supernovae and neutron star collisions tend to collect together in chunks where the atoms are mostly of a particular element. That seems a little weird to me.
@@Slash687 - And these two things mysteriously act as an element sorter? I realized my original statement wasn't clear, so I edited it to make it clear what I was talking about. :-)
In the same way Earth has a rocky surface and an iron-nickel core, melting & gravity can do some sorting, called differentiation. Meteorites can be from the surface or the core of something that got smashed up, and hence be of different types. Some are just an amalgamation from something that was never hot or massive enough to have differentiation occur.
Why shouldn’t they be in chunks? They are produced in bulk under extreme pressure from gravity and other forces. It’s not as if stars or supernovae produce single atoms of different elements one at a time and evenly mixed. I’d say it’s the final explosion of supernovae that breaks down in fragments what were much bigger lumps. 😁
just found this article in norwegian media (NRK) and thought about this episode of SciShow. Its in norwegian, but with a lot of nice pictures! www.nrk.no/skatter-fra-verdensrommet-1.14930142
I have a great book (except every picture has an annoying ring flash) I cannot remember the name of. I have strong magnets in all my friends downspouts. The meteorites are very cool. Put a new cookie sheet under fireworks... Beautiful colored glass and metallic spheres.
About four billion years ago, it is theorized that Jupiter moved throughout the solar system and flung Uranus and Neptune out further, and probably switching the orders of the ice giants
They have video that was taken from f-18 fiter jets . Chasing what they called ticktaks . They were about 40feet Long and making manovers that there's no way anything that humans can make. We can't make manovers like that or travel at speeds like that
a super easy way to do it is just to fix magnets to the outlet of your gutter. It will accumulate micrometeorites (and industrial iron particlulates which are very common in cities) automatically.
The black surface (ablation crust) and the dimples (regmaglypts) are from melting while hurtling through the atmosphere at extreme speed. That’s an awesome find! I hope they have a written record of when and where it was found.
I know. A lecturer I often talk to has a Mars meteorite, bought off of ebay though. It's about the size of a small pebble, but it cost 800 dollar. Spacerocks are crazy expensive, more even if they're from important places (Mars, major asteroids, moon etc.)
I can save you the trouble. Just scoop up some dirt from the backyard and sell the individual grains as micrometeorites. Gullibility is so high right now you'll make a killing. You might even be able to sell regular rocks as small meteorites.
In the 1980's when we passed through Hallies(sp) Comet field, i sat out a large bole of water and the next morning ran a magnet through it and was able to pick up the pieces. Very cool!
it's worth noting that in urban environment you are likely to also pick up a significant ammount of industial iron particulates. I hope you got the chance to analyse your particles as having a suggested source would make a really interesting paper.
@@laellions I do this from time to time when we have other events and I get zip. I will say if I did not b4 that the only way I bot the pieces was using aagnet.
@@EToddRoss Sorry to hear about your strokes :(. That is fascinating though! If you get the chance to analyse particles, even under light microscope, it is definitely worth doing! You might even be able to get a research grant, as you can actually provide a specific body of origin for the micrometeorites! Pinpointing the exact bodies MMs originated from is basically impossible under normal circumstances. Best we can do usually is suggest the rough type of meteorite. Even that is problematic as MM composition often only reflects a single grain from the parent, due to their size. This could be a really cool, and potentially significant paper! Esp. Given that comet debris makes up only about 10% of MMs, and most of them are sub 50um.
@@EToddRoss if you ever do analyse those particles, I would love to take a look. I've just finished a paper on micrometeorites discovered in 20ka british post glacial sediment, so I would love there to be more data available. I could link my throw-away email address, if you are interested, even in just talking about MMs. 😊
As a kid i used to pick up meteorites all over the shale pit near our house and would sell them for like 5 bucks. Turns out they were were iron slag waste from when a train car crashed near us like 60 years ago. Little round lumps the size of marbles. Good thing they wernt actually worth anything considering i probably found a few hundred of them.
What's the largest tree you've found in one? I once had to take out one that was six feet tall and had grown roots down a drainpipe when cleaning up my gradfather's shed.
@@garethdean6382 well... cant say i found a tree in one, not six feet anyways. Did a church that had about a dozen or so saplings from 1-3 feet. None in the downspout.
WE AIN'T FOUND SH*T :D - - - - - Just kidding BUT 80% of earth its water so that's a 20% chance it falls on land, so if you find it. YOU'RE A LUCKY SON OF A B)
If you live near the coast then you can use the method that McGill university scientists did in the 60s, 70s and 80s in a research project in Barbados. They set up sheets covered in petroleum jelly to capture the prevailing wind. Since there was nothing but ocean for thousands of km, a significant proportion of the dust that stuck on the sheets was micro-meteoritres. Though, it did turn out that another significant component was Sahara dust, which was an important discovery in itself since before that it wasn't fully understood how the Sahara fertilises the New World.
About 20 years ago, I was playing with a metal detector. I found a weird hard object that looks like a piece of rock with some kind of "fingerprints". I decided to keep it with the junk (nails, dimes and other metallic objects) that I found. 10 years later I figured that it could be a meteorite. I went to the sheed looking for my metal detecting treasures but I can't find it anymore.
I knew a girl who found a meteorite the size of a softball, In her front yard. She told me she found it out there one day, never recognized the rock itself, but felt as if it just dropped outta the sky into her yard. It was indeed a space rock. It almost looked like a chunk of road or asphalt, but it didn't smell like tar. It smelled like Sulphur and burning metal. It had pits and holes on one side and like a bumpy melted surface on the other. The spot where it was picked up had some little pieces of itself scattered a couple inches around, and the grass looked like it had been chewed on or somebody maybe stamped into the same spot a dozen times. She's had that rock for like 4 years now, displaying it on a shelf and telling the story.
When I was a kid, my dad gave me a meteorite that he had found at work. I marveled over the fact that this rock had been to places I'd never be, out in the vastness of space. Then a few days later he told me he thought he was mistaken and it was debris from welding. I don't have it anymore so I can' say for sure, but I do remember it having the melted exterior of a meteorite (memory can be faulty though).
Sorry to point it out, but might not be the best idea to send people, and especially kids watching the channel, climbing on top of roofs xD Its just an accident waiting to happen
If any of these micrometeorites hit you as it fell from space would you even notice and if not would you notice it if you were completely naked including no underwear?
I found a very porous iron Rock it's stuck to my magnet and after cleaning the debris off I still can't tell myself if it's some meteorite or just a piece of natural iron from the ground very small
"in search of stardust - Amazing Micrometeorites and Their Terrestrial Imposters" by Jon Larson is a good book to have alongside when you go hunting. Great information and photos in the book.
I have not found any, as I have not looked. But I will start looking tomorrow and eventually I will post a video in what I find along with pictures of what I find under a microscope.
