Asteroids, meteors, and meteorites
If you look up into the night sky, you are not just seeing stars. You are also seeing planes as en route to their next destination and rotating satellites as they orbit our earth. On a rare occasion, however, one may just be lucky enough to see a meteorite which is most commonly referred to as a shooting star. However, do not get a meteorite confused with an asteroid. There are many misunderstandings about asteroids, meteors, and meteorites. While all of these rocks originate from space, they have different names depending their location, such as whether they are hurtling through space or hurtling through the atmosphere and impacting Earth’s surface.
In simple terms, an asteroid is a large rocky body in space, in orbit around the Sun while meteoroids are much smaller rocks or particles in orbit around the Sun. If a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere and vaporizes, it becomes a meteor, which is often called a shooting star. On the other hand, if a small asteroid or large meteoroid survives its fiery passage through the Earth’s atmosphere and lands on Earth’s surface, it is then called a meteorite. Another related term is bolide, which is a very bright meteor that often explodes in the atmosphere. This can also be called a fireball.
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| Image: A diagram which helps illustrate the difference between meteoroids, meteors, and meteorites |
Micro-Meteorites
According to researchers from Swedish Lund University and US Universities of Chicago and Wisconsin-Madison, it was found that micro-meteorites have revealed a surprising instability of our universe. The team studied 43 meteorites which were found on the sea floor of the Lynna River in Russa and supposed to have fallen to Earth 470 million years ago. By comparing this finding of meteorites to research from 2016 of a different meteorite, it was found that the flow of meteorites 500 million years ago was completely different to today's and our current understanding of our solar-system's stable history mus now be revised.
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| Image: Micro-meteorites found by James K. Bowden in 2012 at the Franconia Meteorite Strewn |
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