Space Videos

This Space Rock is 4.5 Billion Years Old. Here’s Its Secret…

[PINGING ELECTRONIC MUSIC]

[Two men in latex gloves lay out a large meteorite on a table in a room lined with shelved cabinets.]

DENTON EBEL (Curator, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences): So what I have here is a piece of the Allende meteorite. 

[Close-up of a medium-sized meteorite piece, with a speckled grayish appearance, held by Curator Denton Ebel wearing latex gloves.]

[Map of Allende’s debris field as it fell to earth, over Mexico.]

EBEL: And this rock fell to Earth in early 1969. Why is that important? 

[Ebel examines a large chunk of the Allende meteorite on a clean, white collections table.]

EBEL: It's important because this meteorite was recording what was going on 4.5 billion years ago. 

[An animated visualization of the early solar system shows glowing material orbiting a bright center point.]

[The screen splits in two. On the bottom, the visualization continues. On the top, in a close up, Ebel points out small grains with a slender metal instrument.]

EBEL: In fact, there are grains of material that are the leftovers of the formation of the solar system

[Ebel, a tall man with a white mustache, speaks to camera inside the meteorite collections room. A shelf of large meteorites sits behind him.]

EBEL: So the object must have seen these different conditions in the early solar system, recording the composition, pressure, and temperature. 

[Ebel loads a sample into a large scanning microscope.] 

EBEL: And we can understand what those conditions were because we understand the chemistry. 

[Ebel works on a computer in his office, surrounded by shelves of books and papers.]

EBEL: We can decode the histories of things from the thermodynamic evidence in the rock itself.

[American Museum of Natural History logo animates over a closeup of a colorful microscope image of a meteorite on Ebel’s computer monitor.]

[Ebel pulls out drawers in the collection, examining their contents—meteorites of different shapes and sizes.]

EBEL: I'm Denton Ebel. I'm a curator of meteorites at the American Museum of Natural History. Right now we are in the meteorite collection area. We have cabinets, drawers full of meteorites. 

[Close up of a silvery, reflective meteorite with many intersecting, almost straight lines on its surface. Ebel examines a large, more rocky looking meteorite on a collection table.]

EBEL: And one of the things we do with meteorites is make them available to researchers around the world for research, both about planets and also about the earliest solar system. What's exciting to me is that chemical thermodynamics remains central to all of that.

[Bubbling, boiling water inside a glass container.]

EBEL: Thermodynamics is the understanding of how matter and energy… 

[A split screen shows the boiling water and a close up of the gas burner on a stove igniting.

EBEL: …behave in nature or in the laboratory. 

[The screen splits between swirling, hot lava and a liquid boiling inside a laboratory flask.] 

[Collage of images representing the manufacturing of circuit boards and smelting of metal.]

EBEL: When we're making electronics, when we're smelting steel, we use the science of thermodynamics.

[Quickly animated collage of diagrams, microscopic images, and equipment related to thermodynamic research gives way to a shot of the sun from space, then 3D visualizations representing solids (densely packed cube), liquids (less dense) and gases (freely floating spheres). The periodic table is combined with images of temperature and pressure gauges.]

EBEL: Chemical thermodynamics is the study of energy and the stability of solids, liquids, gases in terms of composition, pressure and temperature. 

[Ebel speaks to camera in the meteorite collection.]

EBEL: How does heat transfer from one thing to another? The science of thermodynamics allows us to predict the behavior of materials without doing an experiment. 

[OIL SIZZLING ON A HOT PAN]

[Screen split in three shows various images of people cooking.]

EBEL: We all experience chemical thermodynamics in our lives. 

[In a heated petri dish, an ice cube melts and steam rises around it.]

EBEL: We live, on Earth, near the triple point—the point at which liquid water—ice—and steam can coexist.

[Close up of surface of boiling water in slow motion. Screen splits with boiling water on the bottom half and slow motion steam curling on the top half.]

EBEL: When you boil water and you make steam, you're creating an equilibrium between the steam just above your pot of water and the water below it. At one atmosphere of pressure, that equilibrium is at 100°C, which allows you to boil pasta.

[Aerial footage of Sierra Nevada mountain range. Screen splits with the mountains moving to the bottom half. On the top half, a view of penne pasta plunging into boiling water.]

EBEL: If you go to the top of the Sierra Nevada and you try and boil pasta there, it's going to take you a long time because the water's boiling at a lower temperature because the pressure is significantly lower. 

[Close up of bubbles from boiling water dissolves into a visualization of rocky masses floating in space amidst hot gases.]

EBEL: This is thermodynamics. We can predict the temperature at which water will boil at any pressure. Extend that concept. Chemical laws, physical laws, operate as far as we know, the same way everywhere in the universe. 

[Visualization of the early solar system showing gases spreading out around a glowing center.]

EBEL: So, the thermodynamics that we use to understand the formation of the minerals in meteorites is based on 100 plus years of experiments in laboratories to understand the behavior of the different elements.

[Animated visualization of the early solar system shows glowing trails of gases swirling around a bright center point.]

EBEL: We can test ideas about what happened in the early solar system, how small solid objects formed, and then mixed together and grew to bigger objects. It allows us to take the composition of the solar system, which is essentially the sun, and predict what minerals would condense, would come from gas to solid form.

[Time lapse of a night sky with meteorites flashing in front of the Milky Way.]

EBEL: In fact, our understanding of how elements behave in nature is driven in part by the understanding of meteorites themselves.

[Ebel displays a slice of the Allende meteorite. He points out small granules of a different color that can be seen embedded in the larger piece.]

EBEL: So we see in this piece of Allende, little round things of different kinds. These round objects—there's one there, there's one—that are called chondrules. 

[Extreme close-up of the meteorite’s surface shows numerous rounded clusters of a lighter color. Animated text reading “chondrule” appears.]

[Microscopic, false color image of a meteorite. A scale bar indicating “1mm” is on the lower left.]

EBEL: Their average size is about 500 microns, maybe five times the width of a human hair. 

[Animated scans of meteorite chondrules in false color show globular forms spinning around.]

EBEL: Chondrules are droplets of once-molten rock. 

[Ebel indicates some of the numerous chondrules on a small slice of a meteorite.]

EBEL: And they are the most abundant component of most of the meteorites that fall to Earth.

[Ebel, wearing cotton gloves, displays a specialized container that holds small, thin slices of meteorite for examination under the scanning microscope. He loads the tray into the machine and operates it via nearby desktop computers.]

EBEL: We can put these under a microscope and we can take images. We can, in fact, map the elements. 

[Displays on the computer monitors show composition graphs with chemical symbols and their proportions in the sample.]

EBEL: So, we can see where all the magnesium is and where it's distributed, the calcium, the aluminum, the silicon.

[Ebel works on a computer in his office. He points out features on a graph on the screen.]

EBEL: And what we've been doing in my group for years now is very carefully measuring how much of each material is in each meteorite. 

[Three very different meteorites—a large polished, metallic slice, a rusty iron chunk, and a stony, hockey puck-like specimen.]

EBEL: Just simply measuring how much stuff of different kinds is in a rock is a very important thing to understand the major differences between the classes of meteorites. 

[Ebel examines a small slice of a meteorite and puts it back inside a plastic case.]

EBEL: And as our understanding improves, we use the rocks to constrain astrophysical theories. 

[Visualization of the early solar system shows rocky debris swirling around a large glowing sphere.]

EBEL: And this is where the science of thermodynamics comes in, is to say this is what could have happened. And this probably is not what happened. 

[Visualization of the early solar system shows distant stars shining through a swirling gas cloud.]

EBEL: How did we heat material in the early solar system? How far out from the early, early sun was there enough heat to melt rocks? How long did it last? 

[Ebel and a collections staff member talk and examine a large flat slice of a meteorite in the collections.]

EBEL: These are the kinds of questions that we look at the meteorites for answers for.

[Ebel inserts a meteorite sample into a container for microscopy.] 

EBEL: The ability to combine chemistry with physical dynamical theories allows you to think about what might have happened and what might be happening in solar systems elsewhere. 

[Visualization of a solar system’s formation shows swirling clouds of dust and gas, orbiting around a glowing central point. On its fringes a planet swings into view.]

EBEL: How are places today forming planets, and why are some planets different than others? That's the holy grail. 

[Credits]