Micrometeorites

After not being able to find any dust mites, you began to wonder what you could see with your microscope. For some strange reason you decided to take some dust from under your bed and put it in a jar of water and see what happened.

A few weeks later, when you looked at a sample of the water under the microscope, little single-celled organisms were swimming around. This led you to believe that there must have been something dormant in the dust under your bed that came to life in water (not a particularly reassuring thought).

Then you went down to the pond nearby and brought back some pond water. There were lots of single-celled organisms in that water, including some mad crazy ones spinning like tops. Next, you collected some saltwater from a marsh near the summer home of the parents of a special friend and looked at that. More mad crazy single- and multi-celled critters were racing around. Their lives resembled bumper cars (Uh, actually, come to think of it, so does yours).

Then you read about micrometeorites -- tiny particles of cosmic dust that make it through the atmosphere and land on Earth. Lots of these itsy bitsy things fall everyday, but they’re much too small to see with The Naked Eye (See The Tardy Boys for more information regarding naked eyes).

Many micrometeorites are metallic so you took a magnet to the beach and swept it over the sand, and didn’t find a single one. Then you read that a good place to find them was at the bottoms of downspouts next to houses. This made sense, since houses have roofs where micrometeorites might land and then rain might wash them into gutters and down downspouts.

You collected debris at the bottom of the downspout of that special friend and studied it under the microscope. Low and behold, amid a lot of other junk, you found micrometeorites!!!



Mr. Bill says, “Zzzzzzzzzzzz. Huh? Don't wake me up until he writes about something interesting.”