vaireeuhs

LOOK AT IT

Hey there,

"Shooting stars" are actually meteors. People once thought they were stars falling from the sky. These tiny grains of dust glow brightly in Earth’s atmosphere because they’re traveling so fast that they release a tremendous amount of energy. 

Meteorites can be huge or tiny. The biggest one ever found weighs around 60 tons, while others are the size of a grain of sand. 

All meteorites come from inside our solar system. Most of them are fragments of asteroids that broke apart long ago in the asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. 

Small pieces of the Moon occasionally reach Earth as meteorites. We know where they come from because they’re identical in composition to the lunar rocks collected by Apollo astronauts. 

Certain “primitive” meteorites contain the first solid material to form in our solar system. Researchers have used the age of this material—4.568 billion years—to determine the age of our solar system.