• Question: What materials come from a meteor?

    Asked by 872newp27 to Triona, Simone, Kieran, Julia, Hugh, Emily on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Kieran

      Kieran answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Meteors mostly are made of rock and metals such as iron. No aliens have been found yet!

    • Photo: Hugh Manning

      Hugh Manning answered on 8 Nov 2018:

      Almost all meteoroids contain stone nickel and iron, some meteors burn up in our atmosphere because they are traveling so fast that they heat up enormously. We see these at night as shooting stars! We can tell what materials these meteors are made from by examining the light the meteor give off as they burn, different materials burn with a different colour light. For larger materials which hit the earth we can try find them and analyze some samples of them.

      Meteors fragments are really rare and expensive, a few grams worth of a meteor is worth thousands of euro!

      Trinity college has a small natural history museum where you can see a chunk of the meteorite that fell in Dundrum, Co Tipperary, in 1865, and a piece of the Adare meteorite that fell in 1813.

      I think the The Natural History Museum in Dublin has some on display also!

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