Where does the metal in meteors come from?

Moment Of Um

Lemonada Media

Kids & Family, Education For Kids

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2024

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Outer space is far from empty. There are chunks of space rock zipping around, and occasionally one of them finds its way through our atmosphere to smack into Earth’s surface. There’s usually metal contained within those space rocks…but where does the metal come from? We asked planetary geologist Paul Byrne to help us find the answer. Got a question that’s totally metal? Send it to us at BrainsOn.org/contact, and we’ll STARt looking for an answer! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the brains behind, brains on, this is Moment of Um.
0:03.4	Moment of Um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Sand and Totten.
0:21.7	Lately, I've gotten super in the metal.
0:28.8	Not the style of music. I mean actual metal.
0:33.2	I think tin and zinc and aluminum are pretty cool.
0:37.4	Oh, and tungsten?
0:38.5	Now that's heavy metal.
0:43.4	No, I mean, tungsten weighs a lot.
0:46.3	Yeah, heavy.
0:47.2	Get it?
0:47.8	Okay.
0:48.7	Anyway, I found out today that some of the metal on our planet came from outer space. Isn't that incredible?
0:58.5	Space metal usually comes from meteorites. You know those clumps of space rock that crashed through
1:04.7	our atmosphere without totally burning up. But wait, if there's metal in those space rocks,
1:10.3	how did it get there?
1:12.7	Eli was curious, too.
1:14.6	Where does the metal in meteorites come from?
1:20.5	So really briefly, most of it comes from stars.
1:24.4	My name is Paul Byrne.
1:26.0	I'm an associate professor here at Washington University in St. Louis.
1:29.6	I'm planetary geologist by training. But really what I do is try and work out why planets look
1:34.6	the way they do. In some cases, it comes from really catastrophically bad explosions where stars hit each
	...

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