Saturday, January 1, 2011

What's different between Meteoroid , Meteor, and Meteorite?

Confuse about Meteoroid , Meteor ,and Meteorite??? Same with me, at first i confuse about three kind of this word...but know i hadn't confuse again...want to know the different???Let's check it out...

meteor When a small rock or bit of dust is floating in space, it is a meteoroid. As it falls through the atmosphere of the Earth, it produces a bright streak of light, and is called a meteor. When it actually makes it to the surface of a planet or moon, we call the rock a meteorite. The brightest meteors are called fireballs. Sometimes these are as bright as the full moon. Micrometeorites are meteorites that are as small as sand grains. These are so small that the atmosphere slows them without heating them, and they drift to the surface of the planet. Imagine,about 100 tons of micrometeorites accumulate on Earth every day.WOW!!!

Why on the moon there are so many crater???
On the Moon, however, there is no atmosphere. So, the meteors won't burn because there is no atmosphere. At last, the meteor will impact the moon surface and cause crater.

There are three basic types of meteorites: iron, stony, and stony-iron
1.  Iron Meteorites
Iron meteorites are the easiest to recognize. Why???Because this meteorites are overly heavy for their size, because they have a high proportion of iron. These meteorites come from planetesimal-sized chunks of rock
iron comet
Iron meteorite

2.  Stony Meteorites
Stony meteorites resemble ordinary rocks. Consequently, stony meteorites are 

much less likely to be found, even though they are much more common than iron 


meteorites. Did u know that 95% of the meteorites that fall to Earth are stony meteorites???It's true. 



Stony 






meteorites have about the same density as ordinary rock,and hence are more difficult to find. Most of these stony meteorites are found in places like Antarctica, or the Sahara desert, where there are few ordinary rocks on the surface.Most stony meteorites contain rounded particles imbedded in the rest of the rock. These lumps are called chondrules and the entire stony meteorite isthen called a chondrite. Carbonaceous chondrites are a special kind of chondrite that contain high levels of carbon and often contain amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
stony meteorite
Stony Meteorite






























3.  Stony - iron meteorite






























Stony-iron meteorites, a hybrid in which pieces of metal are embedded in ordinary 







silicate rock, are less than 1% of the total number of meteorites that fall to Earth.
Stony-iron meteorite

The majority of meteorites probably come from the asteroid belt. Asteroids are
large enough to have held the heat of the early solar system for millions of years.
This allowed them to differentiate, so that the iron fell to the center, surrounded by
a thin stony-iron layer, and enveloped in a thick stone ‘‘crust.’’ When two such
objects collide, the fragments consist of lots of stony meteoroids, fewer iron
meteoroids, and a very small number of stony-iron meteoroids. These fragments
spray away from the collision site, and a few of them eventually find their way to
planets. Other sources of meteorites are comets, the Moon, and Mars.

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