Sometimes, when I look up into the night time sky, I am overwhelmed by a sense of wonder at the vastness of the universe.
On a clear night, the sheer magnitude in the number of stars that are visible seems so absolutely, incredibly amazingly impressive – especially in light of the fact that what we see is but an infinitesimally small number of the countless millions of stars, planets and celestial bodies out there. It is at times like this that I feel rather humble.
Other times, especially on those occasions when I just happen to look up and see something like a shooting star arcing its way across the horizon, or a particularly bright distant star blinking away as if it were sending out some coded message, well, on those occasions my sense of wonder turns to wondering about what really lies out there and whether or not we are alone in this vast universe.
I often think back to the time when I was a kid and I found a rock out in the middle of a farm field. It was unlike any rock I’d ever seen. It was flat and smooth on the top and bottom, and sort of porous and bubbly looking in between – sort of like an Aero chocolate bar. I reasoned that it was probably a meteorite that had landed on earth from somewhere in outer space. I hauled that sucker a couple of miles back to my house. It must a have weighed 25 pounds or more, which was a fair amount considering back then I only weighed 75 pounds or so soaking wet.
The next day I went to the library to look up meteorites. However, no matter how many books I went through, I could not find anything that resembled my meteorite.
Years later in junior high I learned that it was only a chunk of limestone that had probably been deposited in the field by a glacier during the ice age. I still have the stupid thing. It is what astronomers quite often refer to as a “meteor-wrong.”
The word meteor comes from the Greek word meteoron, which roughly translated means phenomenon in the sky. It is used to describe the streak of light produced as matter falls into the Earth’s atmosphere creating a temporary incandescence resulting from atmospheric friction. A meteoroid is matter that is too small to be called an asteroid or a comet, while a meteorite is a meteoroid that has managed to reach the surface of the Earth without being completely vaporized.
In the years since finding my meteor-wrong, I have read a lot about meteors and meteorites. I have also acquired a fair collection of real meteorite fragments. It blows me away to think that the tiny piece of matter I am holding in the palm of my hand came from somewhere out there, somewhere out in that vast universe.
It is hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea that somewhere, way back in time, a star exploded and sent pieces flying out into the cosmos, and that a piece of that star travelled through space for tens of thousands, perhaps millions of years, before making its way into the Earth’s atmosphere where it began to burn up and become reduced in size until it landed unceremoniously and tiny on the surface of a planet in a galaxy known as the Milky Way.
Sometimes, when I look up into the night time sky, I cannot help but wonder if somewhere out there in the cosmos, someone else on the far side of the universe, isn’t just maybe holding a fragment of the same star that flew off in a different direction.
