(mysterious electronic music)
- So, we're out here on the roof
of an apartment building in Brooklyn, New York.
And, we're looking for meteorites.
Pieces of rock and metal that've fallen from space
and have landed here on Earth.
We're obviously not going to find anything big,
but tiny micrometeorites, they're actually everywhere.
They look like the period at the end of a sentence.
But, under the right microscope they're incredible.
We enlisted the help of the amateur scientist
who proved that micrometeorites could be found.
And, using his technique, we're going
to try to find some for ourselves.
Somewhere here.
I'm now realizing how much work it's gonna be
to find one of those.
There's everything, it's picking up so much,
and they're all so tiny.
You don't spend your day tripping over big meteorites
because they tend to burn up in the atmosphere.
You see a shooting star instead.
But, really small ones, or small bits of big ones
do make it down to earth.
We're talking one, or two, or 300 micrometers.
That maybe the fifth of a millimeter across.
Those are sometimes too light to burn up.
Instead, they can melt into little molten blobs
and drift down to the surface.
- The entire process of melting, recrystallization,
and deceleration is just within a fraction of a second.
So, it's practically instantly.
- Here's our meteorite guru, Mr. Jon Larsen.
He's a jazz musician turned amateur scientist.
And, over the past few years, he's stunned
the scientific community by finding and identifying
more than a thousand micrometeorites.
The way Jon tells it, scientists knew that
literally tons of specimen were
landing on earth, all the time.
But, no one thought that they could be located and verified.
- Everybody agreed upon that it was
completely impossible to find the micrometeorites
in populated areas of the world.
And, at the same time, everybody agreed upon
that the daily influx from space
is nearly 100 metric tons of cosmic dust.
So, I was like, hm, 100 metric tons,
and it's impossible to find it?
It doesn't add up.
- [Cory] Some estimates put that closer to 60 tons daily,
but either way it's a lot.
There wasn't a lot of data out there
about what micrometeorites actually looked like.
So, Jon reversed the problem.
He became a painstaking expert
on all the other kids of terrestrial matter out there.
Sand, grit, and tiny bits of metal.
- I had got that far that I had classified
all the terrestrial dust particles
from all over the world, actually.
And, by sheer elimination then
I started finding the micrometeorites.
- We're on a roof because that's
Jon's trick for finding them.
He estimates that a one square meter patch of ground
gets hit with about one micrometeorite per year.
This roof is 3500 square meters.
Which means 3500 micrometeorites hit it
year, after year, after year.
But, we'll be happy if we find just one.
So, the method.
Jon estimates that about 80% of micrometeorites
are metallic, so we'll focus on those.
A powerful neodymium magnet will help us
separate the particles that we're looking for
from other dust and gunk.
I'll just do these two corners I guess, yeah.
The magnet should find specimen
that have iron or nickel in them.
The best places to search are flat roofs
with little to no foot traffic.
High walls can also help prevent micrometeorites
from being carried away by the wind.
All right.
After about 30 minutes of collecting,
we took our samples back to the office for imaging.
But first, there was a little bit more prep to do.
The next step is cleaning what we've got.
The samples are dirty.
So, we're going to clean them off with warm water
and a little dish soap.
The micrometeorites should sink so we can pour off
the dirty water, rinse, and repeat
until all the dirt is gone.
After letting our roof mud dry,
we need to toss out the particles that are too big.
This flour sieve has 300 micrometer mesh.
So, by the end, we're going to be left
with clean metallic candidates
that are no larger than 300 micrometers.
Before we image with our microscope,
we studied up on what they should look like.
We have Jon's book, In Search of Stardust.
Plus a ton of bonus photos that he sent us.
Jon says he wasn't prepared for
the sheer variety that he found.
- No two micrometeorites are alike.
So, within the first year,
I had found 500 different micrometeorites.
And, they were all different.
From glassy spheres until elongated,
and with various types of metal beads scattered around.
So, it was a complete new mapping
of a new type of rock.
- There are also imposters to look out for.
Little bits of rounded rock and metal
that originated here on earth.
Jon has these cataloged too.
They can be natural, lightening strikes for instance
can kick off tiny molten rock particles.
But, a ton are manmade.
Fireworks can spray the earth with metallic detritus.
Power tools can shave off flecks of metal they cut.
Even roofing tiles can shed bits of sand
covered in iron rich glue.
With the knowledge of what to look for,
we started our hunt.
(quick piano music)
And, it wasn't easy.
For three days we searched particle by particle,
looking for anything that might resemble
a tiny pearl amongst other jagged pieces of dust.
Like this one, perfectly spherical,
but perhaps a little too smooth.
Or this one, glass-like, with what appears to be
a piece of metal protruding from it.
Or, this one, a rough red sphere.
Altogether we gathered roughly 19 specimen.
Cataloged them, and separated them
from the rest of the samples.
One, by one, by one.
This was no easy feat.
Just transferring the particles over to their containers
required the precision and accuracy of a wet toothpick.
I lost that really pretty one that I showed,
the one that I showed the whole office.
It was moving over, now it's gone.
I lost it in the transfer.
The last step is for the professionals to check our work.
So, we sent our samples to Norway to be imaged by Jon.
Now, there's a reason Jon's images
look so much better than ours.
It's because he partnered with a geologist
named Jan Braly Kihle.
Jon approached Jan to ask for his help
in imaging the micrometeorites.
And, Jan took some convincing.
- When he first mentioned interplanetary dust,
I just smiled (laughing).
And, was close to taking the phone down
because I thought this was madness.
- But, he signed on.
And, built a whole new system for imaging Jon's samples.
A micrometeorite is so small that you can only
keep a tiny cross section in focus at a time.
To get a full image, you have to photograph
multiple slices, each with a slightly different focus,
and then stack the photos together to create a composite.
Do that with a couple hundred images
and you get something that looks like this.
So, we just got an email from Jon.
He spent a few days going through
our samples that we sent him.
And, we're going to go through the results.
Okay.
The tape and lid on each box was removed before examination.
Two of the boxes were found empty.
All right, so a couple of our samples
clearly didn't make it all the way to Norway.
That's a bummer.
So, number one.
No candidate found in the box.
So, number two is an iron oxide spherule.
Number three, most likely terrestrial.
Number four, also an iron oxide spherule.
Number five, iron oxide spherule.
Number six, iron oxide spherule.
So, a lot of what we found and what Jon says
he has found were iron oxide spherules.
And, he says that they're caused by a lot of mechanical,
human activities like grinding, angle cutting.
And they're distributed throughout the world
through rain, wind, and just normal foot traffic.
Number eight, no spherule could be seen
in the box, which was opened and examined
but nothing was found.
Number 13, this was a cool one too.
He says glassy spherule, with a small metal bead.
But this is too small to give
a definite identification under a microscope.
So, that's not a no.
So, Jon didn't find any good candidates
in the first 14 boxes.
But, in the 15th box, he found this.
And, he asked Jan to image it using his technique.
The sample was slightly darker,
a little bit more elongated.
But, at the end of the day Jon says
that this too was probably terrestrial.
- Damn. - Yeah.
So, while our results are a little disappointing,
it's good to know there's someone in the world
who's dedicating a lot of time to this project.
Jon's next steps are trying to figure out where
in the universe all of these micrometeorites came from.
Some scientists think that the material
comes from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
- Others think the micrometeorites come from
much further out in the solar system.
From beyond Neptune, out in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud.
But, we also know that some of the micrometeorites
contain pre solar grains, matter that comes from
outside our solar system.
And, is older than our sun.
- Each new micrometeorite is its own mystery.
You could spend a lifetime wondering
about a single specimen.
Jon's even found a few that are covered
with a sort of glass foam, and no one knows
what that's all about.
But, here it is.
It never gets old.
- I think they are very beautiful.
And, I think, and surprising.
I found 1,340 as of today.
And, I still, each time I find one more,
my heart really jumped one extra heartbeat.
- Hey everyone, thanks for watching.
This is the first episode in a new series
we're working on called Trial and Error.
Where we try a new experiment every month,
and document the process along the way.
Stay tuned for more, and let us know
in the comments below if there are any experiments
you'd like us to try.
Thanks.