Welcome to You Ask Andy

Charles Hightower, age 12, of Montgomery, Ala., for his question:

HOW DO METEORS AND METEORITES DIFFER?

Europeans and Americans live on different continents; yet, of course, all of them are people. Asians live in Asia and Australians live on the far side of the globe. All of them, naturally, are people  who just happen to be at home in different localities. The same thing might be said of nonliving meteors and meteorites. Meteors are space travelers; meteorites are settled residents of the planet earth.

Both meteors and meteorites originate out there in the trackless spaces between the planets. They come in assorted sizes comparable to grains of sand, pebbles and enormous boulders. Astronomers suspect that these solid chunks were formed when the planets were born, which means that they date back through some 5 billion years.

During all their carefree space traveling days, they are called meteors. They inherited this name from the old word meteor, which at one time meant any unusual event that occurred in the sky ¬including shooting stars and weather events. This is how come the study of weather is called meteorology.

From this clue, we can see that meteors are meteors because they belong up there or out there above or beyond the earth. In countless numbers, these cold dark chunks zoom around the solar system, perhaps faster than 20 miles per second. And from time to time, numbers of large and small meteors are bound to collide with passing planets.

When a meteor comes close enough to feel the earth's gravity, it is pulled down to the surface. on the way down, it must travel hundreds of miles through the atmosphere. This may seem like an airy nothing, but its gaseous molecules force the speeding space traveler to slow down. Some of its speed energy is converted into heat energy. The plunging meteor heats up and lights up. We see its brief moments of blazing glory as a so called falling star.

As a rule, it is a tiny meteor that burns to dusty ashes long before it reaches the ground. But a meteor of a few pounds is big enough to survive the fall. It lands with a thud on the ground or a splash in the sea.

This is the dramatic moment when its name changes from meteor to meteorite. A meteorite is a grounded meteor whose space ¬traveling days are done forever. It lies with the other stones of the earth, forever trapped by the earth's gravity.   Numerous meteors burn to ashes and drift down, adding tons of meteoric dust to the weight of the world. Others plunk down and become pebble size meteorites. A few rare meteorites weigh 60 tons or more. And scientists suspect that in the remote past the earth was struck by whopping meteorites, big enough to make craters a mile or more wide.

 

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