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Transcript · Crash Course
The Quest for Stardust: Crash Course Lecture
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The video tells how Norwegian jazz guitarist Yan Larson, after finding a tiny space rock on his breakfast table in 2009, spent years proving that micrometeorites can be collected from urban roof gutters and other human-populated places, which scientists had considered impossible. His work was confirmed by planetary scientist Matthew Genge and a microprobe analysis, and it shows how cosmic dust may link to the origins of water and life on Earth.
- In summer 2009, Yan Larson found a tiny hard speck on his breakfast table outside his Oslo-area summer cabin and began wondering whether it was extraterrestrial.
- Scientists had long believed that micrometeorites could only be found in remote places like Antarctica and the seafloor, because human dust would overwhelm them in populated areas.
- Yan collected dust with a magnet on roads and across international trips, using the idea that micrometeorites fall evenly everywhere while human dust varies by location.
- Under the microscope, most of his particles were sand or human-made spherules, and he spent years cataloging around 100,000 non-micrometeorite spherules.
- In 2015, Matthew Genge identified one of Yan's particles as a micrometeorite, and a 2016 microprobe analysis confirmed that 49 urban samples were extraterrestrial with compositions matching South Pole samples.
- Yan switched to collecting dust from roof gutters, which yielded fresh micrometeorites, and he found that smaller particles than he had previously sifted out were the ones to look for.
- The video explains that micrometeorites, including carbonaceous chondrites, may have delivered water and key elements such as carbon and nitrogen that are needed for life.
- Yan's discovery has inspired a Facebook community of about 20,000 members, and researchers like Genge hope such dust can reveal pre-solar grains as old as 7 billion years.
A Mysterious Speck Appears
0:00What if you could hold the history of our solar system in your hands? 4.6 billion years ago, there were no planets, just a disc [music] of interstellar dust and gas circling a young sun. Gradually, under the influence of gravity, those bits of dust began to glom together to make planets. [music] But there are leftovers, pieces of matter that never quite made it into proper planets.
0:22Rocky and icy remnants of the solar systems formation. And sometimes one of these rocks falls through our atmosphere, surviving the fiery passage and landing on Earth. [music] We call them meteorites. And when they're really tiny, micrometeorites. These cosmic messengers are like time capsules from the birth of the solar system.
0:42And if we look closely enough, they can tell us about the secret history of the universe [music] and maybe even how life began on our planet. This is a story of an unlikely scientist, a Norwegian jazz musician who [music] became so obsessed with collecting space dust that he eventually upended modern meteoritics.
1:01Hi, I'm Sage [music] and this is a crash course lecture.
1:18This story is based on the meteorite hunters by Joshua Hajigo and Star Hunter by Yan Larson. And it was such an honor for Crash Course to bring these books to life in video form. Our story begins in the summer of 2009. Let's set the scene.
1:38in the summer of 2009 when the jazz guitarist Yan Larson sits down to breakfast outside of his family summer cabin near Oslo. It's here that he notices a tiny dot on the table that wasn't there a moment before. It's smaller than the period at the end of a sentence. He presses his finger to it and notices it feels hard, like a stone.
1:58Jan is in his 50s now, but the rock hunting days of his youth resurfaced instantly. [music] What could this speck be? It clearly fell from the sky. Could it have fallen from space? I'd bet that most of us, myself included, would have shrugged and moved on with our lives, but not Yan. The question lodges itself in his brain like a splinter.
2:16But let's hear Yan's take. >> Despite having been an artist uh for profession for my whole life, I think I I was born with a scientific mindset. I'm sitting here uh at the very place where the black dot appeared on my white [music] table uh 17 years ago and it wasn't there uh moments earlier. So why uh where did it come from?
2:44I was just curious. >> After breakfast, Yan spends the rest of the day sleuththing around the internet and learns a new word, micrometeorite. It turns out Earth gets a constant sprinkling of dust particles from space. We are quite literally surrounded by stardust every day wherever we are on Earth. We don't even realize it.
3:04But here's the catch. There's so much terrestrial dust everywhere [music] that finding extraterrestrial dust is a challenge to say the least. At the time, researchers had managed to extract very old and weathered micromedorites from remote places like Antarctica and the seafloor. But to find a fresh micrometeorite in the city or on your breakfast table, that was considered impossible.
3:27laughable even. While Yan turns all this over in his mind, he takes the tiniest speck from his breakfast table, [music] tucks it inside a matchbox, and stows it safely away. It's the first step on what will prove to be an adventure of cosmic [music] proportions. Without intending to, Yan had entered a long history of meteoritics, or the study of meteors and meteorites, rocks in space and space rocks that land on Earth.
History of Meteorite Science
3:54Humans had been fascinated with meteorites. Well before it was an academic field. One of the first recorded references came from China in 645 B.CE and a work attributed to Confucious. Five stones fell in song. Centuries earlier in ancient Egypt, King Tuten Common was intombed with an iron dagger forged from a meteorite.
4:12Though whether the Egyptians knew it was extraterrestrial is unclear. But in the Western world, well into the 18th century, eyewitness accounts of stones falling from the sky were written off as the ravings of gullible peasants. Hey, life's hard as a peasant. You find excitement where you can get it.
4:28And then came June 16th of 1794 in Sienna, Italy. At the time, the town was stuffed with thousands of rich English tourists. And in the early evening, many of them reported a volley of stones falling from the sky. One is said to have shot through the rim of a boy's felt hat. The near miss of a lifetime.
4:45a nearly very short lifetime. On that same day, about 350 km south, Mount Vuvius had violently erupted. Could the stones have come from Vuvius? William Hamilton, English ambassador to the Court of Naples, investigated by climbing up the volcano once things had calmed down, of course. But he found nothing that resembled the stones.
5:06The next year, a second report came from a tiny village in Yorkshire, England. One mile December afternoon, a large rock crashed to the ground right next to a farm hand named John Shipley. It was huge, weighing 25 kg, about as much as a large tire. But the question remained, where exactly did the stones come from?
5:29Eventually, a promising young chemist named Edward Howard analyzed the composition of a handful of mystery stones. And in 1802, he found that they shared a quantity of nickel that was hard to explain unless the stones were from outer space. You see, back in the 1800s, Howard knew that this amount of nickel was unusual in terrestrial rocks, even if he couldn't explain why.
5:49Today, we know that nickel is a fairly common element on Earth and in our solar system. Earth's geological processes pull heavier substances like nickel inward to the hot metal core. But in meteorites, fragments of nickel remain on the surface. So, a nickel test is often used to identify a rock as extraterrestrial.
6:07Howard's analysis was a key piece of evidence that finally assured Western scientists that meteorites are indeed rocks from space. Flash forward to the 1960s and the International Space Race was in full force. Many US scientists [music] were desperate to get their hands on the hottest geological specimens, moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions.
6:26And meteorites, they were the next best thing. Researchers began to study meteorites in a more systematic way, building up a kind of taxonomy of space rocks. Think of the different types of meteorites like a family tree, where a branch splits based on what the meteorite is made of and what happened to it before it reached Earth.
6:42For meists, the most important distinction is between a condrites and condrites. Aondrites are meteorites that have melted. So, the material inside of them are all mixed together. Well, condrites are meteorites that have never melted. Because of this, they have tiny specks inside called condrils. Flexcks of minerals that have been squeezed together.
7:04These condrils are some of the oldest materials in the known universe. Older than humans, older than Earth, older than well, everything. Scientists have used these ancient specs to determine how old our whole solar system is. We'll return to condright soon. For now, back to Yan.
Yan's Obsessive Dust Hunt
7:29One thing you have to know about Yan is that he has an obsessive personality. And while he dreamed of being a minologist when he grew up, his curiosity took him in a different direction. As a young man, he discovered the Belgian-B born Romani jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt on the radio. Rather than just buying one of his albums, Yan tracked down one of the guitarist old bandmates so he could quiz him about Reinhardt's musical genius.
7:50From there, Yan flung himself [music] into the world of jazz. If rocks were the first passion of his life and Jazz the second, cosmic dust was going to be the third. The only problem was most scientists didn't know much about micromedorites. When Yan's quest began, micromedorite samples were extremely rare, taken from undisturbed places where they mount up in large numbers over long periods of time like the seafloor and Antarctic ice.
8:14The main collection was gathered in the late 1990s by a handful of researchers in the South Pole led by American scientist Susan Taylor. Scientific experts insisted it was impossible to find space dust anywhere humans lived because you know we bring our own dust, lots and lots of dust. And sure, this hypothesis made sense to Yan.
8:34But what didn't make sense to him was that not a single serious researcher even speculated that it was theoretically possible to find stardust in urban spaces or spaces where humans lived like at all. And yet he couldn't get the possibility out of his mind. Especially because one of the first things he learned about micrometeorites is that Earth gets a surprisingly large quantity of them.
9:00More than four tons, a truck full every day. Yan thought, "How is it possible that we're drowning in cosmic dust, but we can't find it?" The second piece of useful intel Yan learned was that micrometeorites mainly consist of the minerals woite and magnetite, both of which are magnetic. If that was the case, could they be collected with a magnet?
9:23He went to the local hardware store and left with a magnetic disc with a hook for a handle. Then he, you know, crouched down on the side of the road and pressed the magnet into the dust. And it worked. I mean, it collected some magnetic particles enough to eventually fill a small box. Yan ignored the curious looks from strangers as he crawled along the road with his magnet.
9:43He was a man on a mission, undaunted by the scientific consensus that finding urban micromedorites was impossible. Back at home, Yan prepared his first samples for his new microscope. He had only two guide rails that the scientific community agreed on. He was looking for spherical shapes less than 2 mm in diameter.
10:00What he saw was a bewildering kaleidoscope, smooth and jagged particles of every imaginable color. >> [snorts] >> Under the microscope, Yan says, "A grain of sand just a millimeter in diameter looks like a mountain scree strewn with all kinds of curious junk." Most of the particles in Yan's collection turned out to be sand and humanmade rust.
10:18The grains of sand were fairly easy to recognize for an experienced rock collector like Yan or me. Humble brag. As for the humanmade rust, those particles all bore signs of the tool or process that had created them. clues like remnants of auto body paint or tiny cork screws from drilling into metal. And therein lies the problem.
10:38See, we are surrounded by human-made microscopic sphericals. They're created by all sorts of activities from construction to fireworks to hitting your car brakes too hard. While they're still in a liquid state, surface tension pulls the melted droplets into a sphere. The same way that raindrops are formed.
10:55They cool extremely rapidly, usually hardening before they even hit the ground. And these furals look so similar to micrometeorites that it creates a real needle in a hay stack situation. On one hand, Yan felt the triumph of scientific progress. He could identify two sphererals that weren't micromedorites.
11:15So, he was two steps closer to finding what he was looking for. But as he thought about how far he still had to go, doubts started to creep in. Were the scientists right? Was he embarking on an impossible [music] task? Beyond was bringing an artist's mind to scientific inquiry. Research, he decided, requires imagination and creativity.
11:33You can't solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. And so his hunt for stardust began in earnest. When we left off on our journey through meteoritics, we were talking about condrites. Meteorites that contain some of the oldest materials in the known universe. Now, the vast majority of meteorites that fall to Earth are a type called ordinary condrites.
11:55And to meteorite researchers, they're well ordinary. They're most commonly made of metals and minerals like iron, pyroxine, and olivine. But there are also rarer types like carbonacious condrites, which often resemble a lump of charcoal that's been left out in the rain. Many of these rocks are brimming with water and organic chemicals, the stuff needed for life to exist.
12:16And while this classification doesn't apply to micrometeorites, those little guys are also diverse in composition, including some varieties that are also rich in carbon, which raises questions about the seeds of life. See, all life needs six key elements: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur, aka schnaps, or I guess schnop or honchk.
12:41Wow, a charming pneummonic truly eludes me on this one. But how did those elements get to Earth in the first place? I'm talking about the origin of life on our planet single-sellled organism style. Now, let's be clear. This is an area that scientists disagree on. But there are broadly two possible sources of offplanet delivery.
12:57One is that occasional comet or asteroid strikes brought the six key elements to Earth. Basically, what might have happened is that sunlight interacts with chemical compounds and the comets and asteroids generating organic chemicals. Then those magic proto beans made their way to our at the time completely inhospitable planet.
13:14And the other possible source is a constant rain of cosmic dust. It's the same general process, but rather than the occasional comet or space rock landing, organic molecules would have been falling constantly in tiny particles of micromedorites. Neither of these explanations is perfect. Asteroid strikes provide brief large doses of elements in one small place, but life would have taken a long time to get going.
13:39Would the occasional asteroid strike have been enough? On the other hand, micrometeorites provide a constant dusting of rare elements everywhere, but would that dusting have been enough in any one place for life to begin? You can see why these are open questions. Now, when we're talking about prerequisites for life, there's another big one.
13:58Water. Because while Earth today is a lush planet of rivers, lakes, and oceans, it doesn't always look like that. So, how did Earth's water get here? There are a few theories, and one of them has to do with, you guessed it, meteorites. See, to figure out where Earth's water came from, scientists turned to something called the dutarium hydrogen or DH ratio of water.
14:14This refers to the relative amount of two isotopes or chemical forms of hydrogen. Based on water samples taken from around the world, scientists determined that the DH ratio for Earth's water has a very small number, 1.56 * 104 for you math nerds out there. Quiz bowler for life. So the question was, did anything in space match the DH ratio of Earth's water?
14:39Because if it did, then that object might have been what brought water to our planet. One of the first suspects was comets, which are known to be rich in ice. But over the years, measurements showed that most comets DH ratios didn't match Earth's in the slightest. Starting in the early 2000s, scientists discovered one type of meteorite that matches Earth's DH ratio pretty closely.
14:58Those carbonatous condrites. They're known to be pretty damp. Well, you know, for a rock. Many planetary scientists now believe these particular meteorites played an important role in delivering water to our planet. There's still a huge amount of uncertainty about the details. Some scientists think that water and the key elements of life were here to begin with.
15:18Others think it was probably a mix of things. Some elements were here to start with and then more were delivered via comets, meteorites, and a constant dusting of micromedorites. But in any case, it's mindblowing. In searching for space dust, Yan was potentially unearthing pieces of the missing origin story of life on Earth.
15:37Let's get back to Yan and his quest to find Stardust among us. According
15:50to scientific consensus, it was impossible to find space dust among all the terrestrial dust out there. But Jan had a hypothesis. He reasoned that micrometeorites should fall to Earth in roughly equal concentrations everywhere. But the various types of terrestrial dust should vary from place to place depending on what human activities were going on nearby.
16:09Like let's say Yan collected dust near a railway line. He'd expect to find a lot more human-made particles than he would in the open countryside, but the number of micromedorites would be similar near the railway line and in the open countryside because they fall evenly from space. So if he could chart all the various kinds of dust and find out which kinds were always present in roughly the same amounts, presto, he would find his quarry.
Finding Stardust in Cities
16:35And so he began an international census of dust. As he toured Europe with his jazz quartet, he'd sneaked out on the streets in the early mornings and collected dust with his magnet. On a family vacation in Malaysia and Thailand, he gathered 50 samples from different environments, [music] roads again, but also coral islands, the jungle, and rainforest rivereds.
16:54He rented a cabin in central Norway and spent 3 days hiking through the mountains, taking samples as he went. >> [music] >> He visited places like welling shops and asked to take sweepings from the floor so he could keep adding to his list of humanmade sphirerals. And when Iceland's a fatal yolk volcano erupted multiple times over the summer of 2010, he took the opportunity to check volcanic ash off the list [music] of mystery sphirerals.
17:18The hunt consumed him. He started dreaming about spirals. Still, Yan decided that it was all worth it if he kept at it. If he mapped all the humanmade sphirerals he could find, [music] maybe someday past his lifetime, other researchers [music] might be able to use his data to find the micromedorites hidden all around us.
17:41Gradually, Yan built a deep [music] knowledge of the intricate world of dust and began to find what he suspected were extraterrestrial particles. But he was reaching the limits of what he could do on his own. He needed [music] an expert. Enter Matthew Genge, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London and the world's leading expert on micromedorites, or as Yan would come to call him, the crown prince of dust.
18:03Jan began to email photos of likelylooking candidates to Genge to ask his opinion. But over the course of his career, the crown prince of dust had gotten these kinds of emails many times. The senders [music] had never found a micromedorite, and he wasn't about to encourage anyone else to clog up his inbox.
18:21Jan, however, was undeterred. >> One side of it is that he had the knowledge. He had the knowledge about micrometerites from uh from the South Pole. I wanted that information. I was very eager to get it. Uh on the other hand, I kn I knew that um he was contacted by hundreds uh perhaps even thousands of similar nut cases like me who uh thought they had found micrometerites or wondered if they had found it and uh wanted wanted his u either approval or confirmation or something.
19:02So, I didn't want to to offend him and I I knew that he was uh not annoyed, but he just wanted me like all the rest of the stupid uh nut cases to to go away. And I can understand that. >> By 2015, 6 years and 600 field searches into his hunt for urban stardust, Yan had amassed an impressive collection of what he called meteor wrongs.
19:27a 100,000 tiny sphererals that were not micromedorites. Thanks to his own hunting and contributions from other citizen scientists around the world, he had a census of dust from every continent on Earth. And through sheer hours at his microscope, he'd gained the ability to recognize that a spiral was terrestrial based on external appearance, even though he couldn't always identify what human process had created it.
19:52But there was something else even more thrilling. In addition to his massive collection of media wrongs, Yan had also collected 500 particles that he suspected might be stardust, including one that he'd taken from the gutter of his summer cabin, just a couple of meters from where he'd found that first speck under an electron microscope at the University of Bergen.
20:17It looked like nothing he'd seen before. As luck would have it, Yan had a date with the crown prince of dust himself. Matthew Genge was coming to Norway to give presentations on micromedorites at universities in Bergen and Oslo. But actually, look, had nothing to do with it. Yan had arranged the lectures himself.
20:31This was his chance to pump Genge for all the micromedorate knowledge he was worth. By this point, Yan had been sending Genge unsolicited dust picks for years with no success. So, over breakfast, when he asked if Genj would mind looking at a picture of the gutter specimen, he wasn't expecting much. and he certainly wasn't expecting Genja's mild response.
20:52Six little words that changed everything. There it is. That's a micromedorite. Yan was astonished, but he felt more unsure than elated. He'd finally accomplish what he set out to do. But could he do it again? Or was this the exception that proved the rule? Back at home with his Meteor Wrongs collection and his first and potentially last micromedorite, Yan reflected on what he learned.
21:19First, this little rock looked nothing like he'd seen in his six-year pursuit. He'd been hunting for sphererals around a millimeter in diameter. But his micromedorite wasn't that. It was an oblong rock, and it was way smaller than his meteors, about a third the size. The sie that Yawn used to separate his dust samples sifted out anything that small, which meant that for the past six years he might have been throwing away a treasure trove of micromedorites.
21:52He would have to start all over. But at least this time he knew what he was looking for. On Earth, dust gets a bad rap. We are constantly wiping down surfaces to get rid of all those particles. We sweep dust bunnies out of corners and cringe at our filthy ceiling fan blades. If you were born in the 1900s and you owned a Nintendo, you probably spent part of your childhood blowing dust out of game cartridges.
22:22But it turns out the cosmos is a dusty place, too. Our solar system is home to dust rings, matter spitting geysers, and dust moons, which sounds more majestic than the dead skin cell and microplastic kind of dust we have down here. Within our solar system and even beyond it, dust particles are constantly being exchanged between celestial bodies.
22:42And that's a good thing because without cosmic dust, we wouldn't have a dynamic universe. We'd just have a bunch of stars producing lifegiving elements, but no way to deliver it anywhere. As the crown prince of dust, Matthew Gench, says, "The dust links stars with everything [music] else. With all the planets, all the living things on those planets."
23:01[music] Micrometeorites originate from several types of celestial bodies. It's thought that many come from comets, those [music] cosmic snowballs made of frozen gases, rock, and dust, most of which orbit in the farthest reaches of our solar system, a sphere-shaped region called the Orort [music] Cloud.
23:17But micrometeorites also originate much closer to Earth in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. [music] A few that have been found are thought to stem from the moon and Mars. And some that have been found are of unknown origin, meaning that they might come from celestial bodies we've never studied before.
23:34As for how they get here, Gench puts it like this. Tiny bits of dust shed off of primitive asteroids and comets. Space rocks made of the same stuff that formed the solar system. That dust starts floating around and forming orbits of its own. Then through a bit of astrophysics, light from the sun slows down the dust's orbit in a phenomenon called pointing Robertson light drag.
23:57This causes the dust to spiral inward toward the sun, crossing the orbits of planets like Earth and getting swept up by them. As the particle enters Earth's atmosphere, it travels almost 40,000 km an hour. And the friction between the rock and air instantly melts it. Air resistance slows the particle so it cools and recristallizes.
24:16And the wind charts its course from there. And that dust delivery system isn't a one-time courtesy. Earth gets a constant sprinkling of cosmic dust all over its surface, which means that the cosmos is constantly delivering life-giving nutrients on our little blue planet. This is really crucial for Earth's oceans.
24:36See, ocean water near the coasts gets nutrients through dust from land, which helps support marine life. like the plankton that form the base of the aquatic food chains. But deep, remote parts of the ocean need other sources. Q. Micrometeorites. Space dust brings essential nutrients like iron to places like the southern Atlantic and southern ocean, as do hydrothermal vents to the ocean floor.
24:59How's that for a dynamic universe? Let's go back to Yan and see if he's any closer to finding a second micromedorite.
Rooftop Gutters and Confirmation
25:11For the residents of Braveique in 2015, spring maintenance was easier than usual. That's because a curious jazz musician with a ladder and a magnet was going from house to house asking to sweep out roof gutters. Yan had a new strategy for his hunt for stardust. He was searching one story closer to the stars.
25:28After all, his first confirmed micrometeorite had come from his cabin's rooftop gutter. Instead of sifting out the smallest particles, those were the samples he collected to check under his microscope. His first field search using this method was actually his 727th and the dust he found looked promising.
25:46Jan couldn't put his finger on it, but something about these particles was different. Over one weekend in Brave, he collected 23 potential micromedorites. Jan recorded his daily rooftop hunts in a journal. Yellow marked entries where he found a contender. As he refined his process using Google Earth to find big sloping roofs, more and more yellow appeared.
26:07At Valhall Arena in Oslo, he found 14 potential micromedorites. Because the grounds keeper told Yan he swept the gutters once a year, Yan figured that these were the freshest micromedorites to have ever been found on Earth, way younger than the samples at the South Pole, which were thousands to millions of years old.
26:23By winter, Jan had found 527 potential micromedorites. But even as he was uncovering a treasure trove, the scientific community still agreed that finding urban micromedorites was impossible. Yan kept sending pictures to Genj, who could only say the candidate looked promising. Genj's colleagues were so reluctant to believe Yan's findings that they floated a new hypothesis.
26:51Earth must suddenly be getting a lot more stardust. The only way to know for sure was a micro probe analysis. basically an electron microscope that also does chemical analysis. Super fancy science stuff. And while jazz musicians typically don't have access to such high-end equipment, Yan happened to know dust royalty.
27:09Genj arranged a microp probe analysis in January of 2016 at the Natural History Museum in London. The process would take a week to complete. Jan met Genge in London with 49 potential micrometeorites. They cast the samples in plastic and polished them, then programmed the instruments to work day and night.
27:26They measured and analyzed samples and took high-res images of their internal structures. Finally, Friday afternoon arrived. After 7 years of stardust hunting, Yan felt as if a sentence was about to be passed on his entire life. If he failed, he hoped to be swallowed by a black hole. But the results showed definitively, without a doubt, that Yan had done it.
27:49Every single rock was extraterrestrial and their chemical composition matched those found in the South Pole. Fresh urban stardust discovered in the roof gutters of Norway. A practically renewable resource that can teach us about the origins of our solar system and maybe even how life began on Earth. It was time to bring the news to the scientific community.
28:13Genjin invited Yan to share his discovery at an annual gathering of the world's most prominent meteorite researchers. As Yan wrapped up his presentation of the so-called impossible, the faces looking back at him were unreadable. The room was so silent, you might have been able to hear a micromedorite land on the roof.
28:30And then a wave of applause washed over yawn. Meteoriticists cheered and stamped their feet for the jazz guitarist turned citizen scientists who'd upended their understanding of cosmic dust. Afterward, everything changed. The scientific community was amazed that Yan had managed to find urban micromedorites.
28:54But what amazed Yan the most was something else. They all looked different. Each new search added to a panorama of different shapes, colors, and patterns. >> If you have seen a few micrometerites, especially in color photography, in large magnification, they are different from everything else. And that of course is because they have gone through something that no other rocks has gone through.
29:22They have entered our atmosphere at hyper velocity. They have melted still in in high speed and then cooling recrystallization. They are actually aerodynamic stones. No, no other rocks are aerodynamic in that respect. And they are recristallized mainly. So there are small crystal balls and even the colors the glossy parts with greenish, brownish, yellow golden use with these golden metal pearls uh or beads.
29:57They are just like nothing else. >> It all has to do with what happened to the micromedorite as it passed through the atmosphere and how hot it got in the process. Like this cryptocrystallin micromedorite. In its liquid state, the metal and mineral portions separated due to their different densities.
30:14And as the particle decelerated in the atmosphere, inertia cause the metal to be thrown forward. Sort of like a person getting thrown against their seat belt when a car breaks sharply. Given that micromedorites are about the width of a human hair, we might never have known how beautiful they are without the innovative photography techniques of Yansila.
30:31He developed a customuilt camera rig in his basement that takes separate snaps of the particle surface bit by bit. Then he uses software to stitch those photos into a complete picture at 3,000 times magnification, which is how you get stunners like this in National Geographic. We are surrounded by these teeny tiny beautiful cosmic rocks.
30:52There's probably one in your roof gutter right now. There might even be one in your hair. Yan Larson didn't discover micromedorites. He wasn't even the first to try hunting them with magnets or looking for them in gutters, but he was the first to stick it out. And his persistence has inspired a growing community.
31:11The Facebook group he started, Project Stardust, now has 20,000 members, and there are plenty of videos and books that explain how ordinary people can follow in his footsteps to find tiny shiny meteorites on their own rooftops. The curious amateur, Jon says, has a big role to play in scientific breakthroughs, which is one reason why he spends a third of his time these days taking microscopes and micromedorites into schools and watching new citizen scientists develop before his eyes.
31:39>> They are easy to identify when you know what to look for. For the first seven years, I had been searching in the wrong size and I broke the code here at this very place. Uh it's 10 years now. 10 years ago, I realized everyone can find these easily everywhere. You just have to know what to look for.
32:01>> As more people join in the hunt for the universe's most exotic particles, Jan expects they'll improve on his methodology. Just look at researchers Penny Vosnikvich and Matias Vonkin at the University of Kent in the UK. They've been collecting micromedorites from the roofs of cathedrals. One goal of their research is to get an accurate idea of the flux of cosmic dust.
32:19They hope to work out just how much stardust is raining down on Earth. But even more profound discoveries await. Matthew Genge says that some micrometeorites have been found to contain what are called pre-olar grains. Specks of material as much as 7 billion years old. Given that our solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago, these specks must have originally come from beyond our solar system.
32:46And Yan has another question. If cosmic dust is everywhere, could it be sprinkling the conditions for life on exoplanets we don't even know about yet? It's mindblowing to imagine. As Carl Sean said, the size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. But that doesn't stop us from trying.
33:08Thanks for watching this Crash Course lecture. It was filmed at our studio in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was made with the help of all these cool jazzy cats. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon. >> [music]
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