Touching a Meteor | StarTalk

As far as science was concerned, I was completely hopeless. I mean, I remember, um, in my biology class, I was put in the front row. I hated being in the front row because, you know, you're in direct contact with the person who was teaching you. I would have an earphone in my ear; I had one of these first transistors because I'm very old. So, transistors sort of came out when I was young, radio, and it was smallish. I had the earphone, and I was listening to the tennis. In other words, I was not paying attention in class at all. But I was doing very badly.

But at prep school, I discovered a, um, meteorite as I was walking back from the games. Sadly, I didn't put it in my pocket; it was quite large. I was honest; I gave it to the Headmaster, and, um, it was sort of, I don't know where it went. It went to a museum or something, but I wish I had kept it. Isn't it just so you can relive the moment when you discovered a meteorite in the flower bed of your prep school many moons ago? I have a meteorite that you can touch, but you're not—I'm not going to hand it to you because I don't know what you're going to do with it.

“Well, I'll be very careful of it. I'll be very respectful! This is 4 and a half billion years old.”

“What? Whoa!”

“Well now, what—why I'm amazed by this—is this a part of a meteorite?”

“Yes, it is part. That—he's a good clever man here. You—you hired the right guy for your movie. This is part of a meteorite that was the size of that sphere of the Hayden sphere, most of which vaporized on impact with Earth. Fragments got strewn around, and the crater that was made by the parent of this is still around. You can find it in Arizona, and it's called Meteor Crater.”

“Have you analyzed this?”

“It's mostly iron—about 90% iron, 10% nickel—common in the kind of meteorite that this is. Now here's something to think about: once you feel that, imagine that just falling from the ceiling, oh, and hitting you in the head. Then your head is a pile of goo. Right? Now imagine something the size of that sphere, and it's going to make a crater a mile across. Now imagine something the size of Mount Everest moving at 10 miles per second, and you can judge how devastating that can be to our ecosystem.”

“Did it affect the tilt?”

“No, on that level, it's like a gnat flying into the buttocks of an elephant.”

“Right, right, right. I'm not flying into the butt—yeah, we had some elephants on our movie. One walked off set, actually.”

“Oh really? Okay, probably.”

“KN in the box.”