Meteorites at BYU

BYU NewsNet reports on a BYU geology prof's presentation on meteorites yesterday (as part of the "Global Awareness" lecture series). We may take the idea of rocks dropping from the sky for granted, but you have to sympathize with the ancients who had to come up with some sort of theory to explain it. Nothing in the BYU story about the age of meteorites, which may or may not have been raised in the talk. They're very old.

Here's an excerpt from a United States Geological Survey publication that gives some information on the topic:

Thousands of meteorites, which are fragments of asteroids that fall to Earth, have been recovered. These primitive objects provide the best ages for the time of formation of the Solar System. There are more than 70 meteorites, of different types, whose ages have been measured using radiometric dating techniques. The results show that the meteorites, and therefore the Solar System, formed between 4.53 and 4.58 billion years ago.

Comments

[John Remy]

I think that we take for granted a universe that is ever changing. Certainly our view of it has been radically disrupted, again and again, over the past century.

Outside of the sphere of the sun, the moon and the planets, the ancients must have felt that the dome of stars was quite static. Any deviation from the usual patterns--comets, meteors, eclipses and supernovae--must have been very frightening (esp. meteor showers!).