The Mysteries of Meteorites

Approximately 15 000 tonnes of space dust, known as meteoroids enters Earth's atmosphere each year. Did you know that whether this space matter is still in outer space, in Earth's atmosphere, or residing on Earth's ground it is called something different?

Outer Space	Meteoroid
Atmosphere	Meteor (shooting star)
Ground	Meteorite

We can learn a lot about our solar system from meteorites, including the existence of life on other planets.  "DNA Building Blocks can be Made in Space" is a NASA video showing some of the evidence that meteorites have presented us with for life in space or the theory that life on Earth originally came from outer space. What do you think? Do you believe there's life out there other than on our own planet? How do you think we got here? Creationism? Evolution? Personally, I am a person of faith but I believe in evolution. I think we all started from something very simple and evolved over millions of years to where we are today. Did we come as pieces of DNA from outer space? Perhaps, but then that leads us to more questions than it actually solves. How did DNA get into space for instance?

(Photo of meteor shower by: Joe Lencioni)

There are three main types of meteorites that typically pass through the atmoshere. These are in decreasing order of popularity: stony, stony-iron, and iron. There composition is stated directly by their name; iron meteorites are composed primarily of iron and nickel whereas stony meteorites are composed mainly of stone. Most meteorites are quite small, however, ones as large as 1.2Km in diameter such as the one that created the Barringer Crater have been recorded. It is also suggested that a very large meteorite was responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs? What other theories do you know of that may have caused dinosaurs to go extinct? I do believe that a meteorite hit the Earth causing an Ice Age and the extinction of the dinosaurs as evidence suggests.