How to Collect Your Own Stardust

 

How would you like to collect some extraterrestrial dust? Scientists estimate that thousands of tons of meteorite dust fall to Earth every day. Passage through our atmosphere reduces most meteoroids to fine particles of dust. That dust then gently falls to the ground or rain washes it out of the sky. That’s your ticket to capturing some meteorite dust.

Many meteorites contain a high proportion of nickel and iron, both of which possess magnetic properties. That property of meteorite dust provides a quick and cheap way to separate it from the far more common terrestrial dust.

Fill a large bowl partly full of water. Use a glass, aluminum, or plastic bowl, not a steel one. Make sure a magnet won’t stick to your bowl. Place it on something that puts it up and away from ground level. This helps reduce the amount of Earth dust that’s kicked up by cars and wind. You need to put it out in the open where it can collect any rain. If you’re doing this during the warmest days of summer, you need to check it pretty regularly. Keep water in the bowl so the dust doesn’t dry out and blow away. You can also collect runoff water from your roof gutter’s downspout.

After several weeks, or after rain, retrieve your bowl. Get a second bowl or container. This doesn’t need to be as large as the first one. If you get rain within a few days after a meteor shower, your chances of capturing meteorite dust increase. You can check the dates of meteor showers at http://www.amsmeteors.org/meteor-showers/meteor-shower-calendar/.  

Meteor Shower, credit NASA/JPL

Wrap a magnet in a plastic bag, and run it over the bottom of the collection bowl. Make sure you pass it over any sediment that you see in the bowl, or, better still, very slightly stir up the sediment.

Micrometeorites in rainwater

Anything that sticks to the magnet is most likely a bit of a meteorite, your own shooting star dust. Now put the plastic-wrapped magnet into the second bowl. Carefully pull the magnet out of the plastic bag. Meteorite dust makes up much of what falls off. You may only get a few sand-grain-sized or smaller pieces. Considering that the bodies orbiting in the Asteroid Belt and comets, the prime sources of meteorite dust on Earth, were created by the same material that made our sun and all the planets at the very beginning of our solar system’s formation, the age of the fragments you collect exceeds four billion years!