Hello, hello, hello, Merry Christmas and happy holidays to anyone listening.

Welcome to Part 1 of this strange winter break adventure, my slightly lame holiday gift to you.

There are going to be 20 of these episodes, some of my very favorites, all pulled from the archives, and this is going to go until

about January 19th, and I wanted to do something special with these episodes.

So this is my slightly weird ambition. Each of these four weeks

will be dedicated to a different theme. Moving from outer space to the extremes of Earth to animal life, to us, the strangest animal of them all.

And this week is all about space.

So let's start as far away as we can get. Beyond not just Earth, but far beyond our solar system.

This is an interview episode I did with a young student named Amir

Saraj who made a mind-bending discovery back in 2019. This is truly one of the

favorite episodes I've ever done. I hope you enjoy it and if you do come back

tomorrow for day two of Space Week. It's the middle of the night, Papua New Guinea time on January 8, 2014, and a meteoroid is hurtling through space towards the Earth's

atmosphere. We think this object was probably between half a meter and one meter in size so between a sort of

microwave and a dishwasher. Okay not not a rock you'd want to be hit by but

like not catastrophic either.

Yeah that's right.

As it hit the atmosphere it, like a cosmic firework.

You can sort of think of what the event looked like as this really violent sudden explosion followed by a rain of melted droplets raining down

into the into the Pacific at cosmic speed. This rock came from space, but what's even more interesting than that is where in space it came from.

I'm Delantheuris, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's, nay, the universe's strange,

incredible and wondrous places.

And today we're talking to Amir Suraj.

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