Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain
Speaker 1: Stuff Lauren Vogal bomb here. Meteor showers are spectacular, but
Speaker 1: one of the most amazing things about these displays is
Speaker 1: that the majority of the space debris that causes visible
Speaker 1: meteors is tiny, between the size of a grain of
Speaker 1: sand and the size of a small pebble. Discussing meteor
Speaker 1: activity can be tricky because the terminology is a little confusing.
Speaker 1: The term meteor actually refers to the streak of light
Speaker 1: caused by a piece of space debreed burning up in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere. The pieces of debris are called meteoroids, and
Speaker 1: the remnants of the debris that reach Earth's surface or
Speaker 1: the surface of other planets are called meteorites. Meteoroids come
Speaker 1: in a pretty wide range of sizes. They include any
Speaker 1: space to breed bigger than a molecule and smaller than
Speaker 1: a hundred meters in diameter that's about three ft. A
Speaker 1: space debreed bigger than this is considered an asteroid. But
Speaker 1: most of the debris that Earth comes in contact with
Speaker 1: is dust shed by comets traveling through the Solar System.
Speaker 1: This dust tends to be made up of very small particles,
Speaker 1: so how can we see a meteor caused by such
Speaker 1: a tiny bit of matter? What these meteoroids black and mass?
Speaker 1: They make up foreign speed, and this is what causes
Speaker 1: the flash of light in the sky. Meteoroids enter the
Speaker 1: atmosphere extremely high speeds a seven to forty five miles
Speaker 1: per second, that's about eleven to seventy two kilometers per second.
Speaker 1: They can travel at this rate very easily in the
Speaker 1: near vacuum of space because there's not a lot to
Speaker 1: stop them. Art's atmosphere, on the other hand, is full
Speaker 1: of matter, which creates a great deal of friction on
Speaker 1: a traveling object. This friction generates high heat up to
Speaker 1: three thousand degrees fahrenheit or one thousand, six hundred degrees celsius,
Speaker 1: and can raise the meteoroids surface to its boiling point
Speaker 1: so that the meteoroid is vaporized layer by layer. The
Speaker 1: friction breaks the molecules of both the meteoroid material and
Speaker 1: the atmosphere into lowing ionized particles, which then recombine, releasing
Speaker 1: light energy to form a bright tail. A meteor tail
Speaker 1: caused by a grain sized meteoroid will only be a
Speaker 1: few feet wide or about a meter, but because of
Speaker 1: the high speed of the debris maybe many miles long.
Speaker 1: So how big does a meteoroid have to be to
Speaker 1: make it to the surface of the Earth. Perhaps surprisingly,
Speaker 1: most of the meteoroids that reach the ground are especially small,
Speaker 1: from microscopic to dust particle sized pieces. They don't get
Speaker 1: vaporized because they're light enough that they slow down pretty easily.
Speaker 1: I'm moving in a mirror one inch or two and
Speaker 1: a half centimeters per second through the atmosphere. They don't
Speaker 1: experience the intense friction that larger meteoroids do. In this sense,
Speaker 1: most all meteoroids that enter the atmosphere make it to
Speaker 1: the ground in the form of microscopic dust, as four
Speaker 1: meteoroids that are big enough to form visible meteors. Estimates
Speaker 1: for the minimum size vary. This is because there are
Speaker 1: factors other than size involved. Most notably, a meteoroid's entry
Speaker 1: speed affects its chances of reaching the surface because it
Speaker 1: determines the amount of friction the meteoroid experiences. And typically,
Speaker 1: though a meteoroid would have to be about the size
Speaker 1: of a marble for a portion of it to reach
Speaker 1: the Earth's surface, smaller particles burn up in the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: The meteorites a person is likely to find on the
Speaker 1: ground probably come from significantly larger meteoroids, pieces of debris
Speaker 1: at least the size of basketball, typically because larger meteoroids
Speaker 1: usually break up into smaller chunks as they travel through
Speaker 1: the atmosphere. Estimates of how much space debris false to
Speaker 1: Earth very widely. Researchers have looked at everything from polar
Speaker 1: ice cores to the composition of the atmosphere to try
Speaker 1: to ssess it out. Studies from the past few years
Speaker 1: have indicated that as much as sixty tons of space
Speaker 1: dust and tiny rocks might make impact every day, which
Speaker 1: means that chances are decent that you can find some
Speaker 1: in your own backyard. You can try putting out a
Speaker 1: pan on a clear or day or night, or looking
Speaker 1: for tiny rocks near the outlet of rain gutter pipes.
Speaker 1: A strong magnet will pick up potential micro meteorites. Of course,
Speaker 1: some normal earth stuff will latch onto a magnet too.
Speaker 1: You can tell micro meteorites apart because they'll be spherical,
Speaker 1: and if you look at them under a microscope, they'll
Speaker 1: have a glassy crusting formed during their fiery fall. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by somebody on the house Stuff Works
Speaker 1: team in the Way Back and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: For more in this and lots of other topics, visit
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. Rain Stuff is production of
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