Coffeeshop Astrophysics – Space Rocks and Stardust

Space Rocks and Stardust

Speakers: Pratyasha Gitika, Tamal RoyChowdhury, Laila Vleeschower

Are shooting stars really stars falling from the sky? Spoiler alert: they’re not! Those quick flashes of light are actually tiny bits of space dust and rock burning up in our atmosphere. In this talk, we’ll take a journey through the leftovers of the formation of our Solar System: asteroids, meteorites, and comets. We’ll talk about how these cosmic “crumbs” sometimes light up our skies as meteor showers, how a rock you could hold in your hand might be older than the Earth itself, and how one very big space rock may have changed the path of life’s evolution on Earth by wiping out the dinosaurs.

More information is available on the Coffeeshop Astrophysics website.