[Rockhounds] CAN YOU REALLY FIND MICROMETEORITES IN YOUR GUTTER? WELL…

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

I collect meteorites <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuDfZ2Md5x8>, and
have quite a few knocking around my home office. Some are big — fist-sized,
with one I bring with me when I give talks about impacts so people can hold
a piece of an asteroid in their hand — but most are pretty small, like the
size of a finger from the last joint to the tip. A few are pebbles
(generally well-known ones with special scientific interest, making bigger
pieces hard to obtain), and a couple of are sand-grain-sized (one is from
the Moon and the other from Mars).

While I don't collect them, there is another kind that’s even smaller:
Micrometeorites, usually smaller than a millimeter across, some so teeny
you need a microscope to see them clearly. Bigger ones (say, a tenth of a
millimeter and up) are usually spherical or close to it, because they melt
completely as the ram through our atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, then
solidify after they've slowed down to subsonic speeds (in fact they
probably fall the rest of the way extremely slowly due to their size).

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/can-you-really-find-micrometeorites-in-your-gutter-well