14.2 Meteorites: stones from heaven

Learning objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Explain the origin of meteorites and the difference between a meteor and a meteorite
• Describe how most meteorites have been found
• Explain how primitive stone meteorites are significantly different from other types
• Explain how the study of meteorites informs our understanding of the age of the solar system.

Any fragment of interplanetary debris that survives its fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere is called a meteorite    . Meteorites fall only very rarely in any one locality, but over the entire Earth thousands fall each year. Some meteorites are loners, but many are fragments from the breakup in the atmosphere of a single larger object. These rocks from the sky carry a remarkable record of the formation and early history of the solar system.

Extraterrestrial origin of meteorites

Occasional meteorites have been found throughout history, but their extraterrestrial origin was not accepted by scientists until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Before that, these strange stones were either ignored or considered to have a supernatural origin.

The falls of the earliest recovered meteorites are lost in the fog of mythology. A number of religious texts speak of stones from heaven, which sometimes arrived at opportune moments to smite the enemies of the authors of those texts. At least one sacred meteorite has apparently survived in the form of the Ka’aba, the holy black stone in Mecca that is revered by Islam as a relic from the time of the Patriarchs—although understandably, no chip from this sacred stone has been subject to detailed chemical analysis.

The modern scientific history of the meteorites begins in the late eighteenth century, when a few scientists suggested that some strange-looking stones had such peculiar composition and structure that they were probably not of terrestrial origin. The idea that indeed “stones fall from the sky” was generally accepted only after a scientific team led by French physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot investigated a well-observed fall in 1803.

Meteorites sometimes fall in groups or showers. Such a fall occurs when a single larger object breaks up during its violent passage through the atmosphere. It is important to remember that such a shower of meteorites has nothing to do with a meteor shower . No meteorites have ever been recovered in association with meteor showers. Whatever the ultimate source of the meteorites, they do not appear to come from the comets or their associated particle streams.

Meteorite falls and finds

Meteorites are found in two ways. First, sometimes bright meteors (fireballs) are observed to penetrate the atmosphere to low altitudes. If we search the area beneath the point where the fireball burned out, we may find one or more remnants that reached the ground. Observed meteorite falls , in other words, may lead to the recovery of fallen meteorites. (A few meteorites have even hit buildings or, very rarely, people; see Making Connections: Some Striking Meteorites ). The 2013 Chelyabinsk fireball, which we discussed in the chapter on Comets and Asteroids: Debris of the Solar System , produced tens of thousands of small meteorites, many of them easy to find because these dark stones fell on snow.