 But here on the given Monday, well, January 30 has gone well into the year and the administration as we have seen over the weekend. Today's special guest from SOES, from HIGP, Professor Gary Huss, he's Professor of Cosmo Chemistry. Cosmo Chemistry. Cosmo Chemistry. Cosmo Chemistry. Yeah, I bet you never met anybody up to this point, okay, and he's Professor at HIGP in SOES. That's Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology in the School of Ocean and Earth Science at UH Manoa. And here on research in Manoa, we're talking about, let's see, this is how meteorites tell us about the solar system. That's our title of our show, I bet we can't, most of us don't know the answer to that just yet. So let's talk, welcome to the show Gary. Thank you. Great to have you here. Let's talk about meteorites first. We have some meteorite pieces, fragments I guess, on the table. What is this? Well, what I have here is a selection of various different kinds of meteorites. These are the leftovers from when the solar system originally formed. So if we look at that first slide that we have, you'll see a schematic drawing of what happens when the solar system forms. We have a cloud in the upper left of dust and gas. It's very cold. It collapses into a protostar and a disk. The disk evolves and by the time you get over to number D, it started to make planets. The meteorites date from the time between about B and D on that picture. So we know this is what's happening because now we have the ability to look at things with telescopes. So in the next picture we see an image from the Alma Array, which is a brand new array in Chile that can see with infrared radiation to very high spatial resolution. And that is the disk around a protostar that's now forming. It's a little bit smaller than the sun, but you can see that this is what's going on. We're now able to compare images of what's happening now to the objects that we have. So we know the physics from looking out into space with these high-powering telescopes. That's correct. Fabulous. And so then this is what we end up with. So where do these come from? Well they reside in the asteroid belt, and they come to Earth with a kind of an exciting display. What's the asteroid belt? The asteroid belt is located between Mars and Jupiter in the solar system. It consists of a few million very small objects that you can either think of them as a failed planet or there just never was enough material to make a planet. Are these an example? These are pieces of those asteroids. And you'll see when I show you this image why they're just pieces, there have been a few that have arrived as big bodies. The dinosaurs are gone because one arrived as a big body. Really? That must have been a bad day. It was a bad day. It blew a hole about 300 kilometers across in the Yucatan, and the dinosaurs didn't make it. But that left room for us. So it's not totally bad. All right. Part of the process. Part of the process. So can we run our little movie about the arrival of a meteorite? So this is a fireball that was viewed by people all over New York State in 1992 during football season. And it's a body several hundred kilograms coming to Earth, and you see all the different bright spots. Those are pieces. So it's broken into several pieces. This entire event lasted 15, 20 seconds. There's the trajectory. It landed in the town of Peekskill, New York. And that last image that just flashed by was a picture of a car with a meteorite stuck in its trunk. The meteorite came down and actually hit this car. I hope the insurance covered that. Actually they did it better than that because the car wasn't worth much until the meteorite hit it. And then it was worth a lot. Yeah, there's the meteorites over on the right side. Oh my goodness. Put a way to wake up. Biger piece like in the Yucatan. And so we have some examples on the table. The ones when they first arrive are like these two over here. They have a black crust on them, if you compare this one. It's white in the middle and black on the outside. And that crust is about the thickness of your fingernail. And that happens by melting when it passes through the air. So that fireball that you saw was producing this kind of a fusion crust on the outside of these objects as they came in. And that's one of the distinguishing characteristics of meteorites. I lifted some of these pieces up. And that's actually my favorite piece when you talk about that. But I just want to point out that they're heavy. They are indeed heavy. And there's a reason for that. A lot of them contain nickel-iron metal. There's a group across the back and across here that are shiny. These are cut faces. These are natural samples. And Jake can pick one up and you can watch him strain. Yeah. Oh yeah. This is really heavy, really heavy. This must be 20, 25 pounds, maybe more. It's not that big. It fools you because it's smaller than you would expect. It's much heavier for its size than you would expect. It probably is only about 10 or 11 pounds. But that's a lot bigger than you would think when it's that size. So they're very heavy. And that's another way you can tell a meteorite is by its weight. Now there are pure iron meteorites like these. And then there's stone and iron meteorites like this. So it has smooth surface on the outside with the fusion crust. And if you cut it open, there's little flakes of metal. And if I hold it like that, you can see on the picture that there's little flakes of metal on it. And that is iron. And that's nickel-iron metal also. But this only has 10%, 15% metal, and this is 100% metal. So that one is going to be lighter. It's not as heavy as these others. That's correct. So these are collected. Who collects these things? Where do you find them? I mean, you can't go to a peak scale all the time. No, you can't. In fact, that's where I get to tell you how I became interested in this because I come from a family of meteorite people. And my grandfather, Harvey Nininger, saw a fireball like that in 1923 and said, I'm going to go find that. And so he followed trail of observations until he got to where it supposedly ended. And he looked around and he didn't find it. But he found another meteorite. And so that got him off on finding meteorites. That's like a needle in a haystack. The chances of two coming down in the same area are not very great. Well, it's not as bad as you think. And this is his main contribution. He decided that it was possible to go out and actively search for and find meteorites. Everybody told him he was out of his mind. Head of the Smithsonian, the head of the Field Museum at Chicago said, you can't do that. Well, he didn't do exactly what they said. He didn't go out and walk across all the fields. He went out and told all the farmers that while they were farming, they should look for meteorites and showed them what they were. And over the period from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, he recovered 250 meteorite falls that were not previously known to science. And nobody else had a record like that? Nobody had a record like that. Then my dad took over from that. He married my mom, who was the daughter of Niner. And he continued the field program until 1991, and he recovered about another 250 meteorites. So at that point, the two of them were responsible for about a quarter of the meteorites known. Are any of those meteorites on this table today, actually, Gary? Yes. Quite a few of them, in fact. Part of the family collection, so to say. Part of the family collection. This one was recovered by my dad. This one was recovered by my dad. This one was recovered by my grandfather. These two were recovered by my dad. This one's my dad's. This one was most likely my grandfather's. That's fabulous. So they did pretty well. But they also, right at the end, my dad learned something that basically put them out of business. He learned that it's possible that you can go walk on the fields and find meteorites. There was a group in eastern New Mexico about four people who had found meteorite, and they started a competition amongst themselves. In this particular area, the dust bowl had caused all the soil to blow away, leaving all the rocks that were in the top meter or so down on a hard-pan surface. So they'd go where the soil had blown away and walk around for meteorites. And it was a pretty good competition when they were between about 10 and 15. But then one guy just blew everybody else out of the water and found 140. He had a trick of some kind. He had a trick of some kind. We went out and walked with them, and we found one while we were walking with them. But what that showed is that there are a lot more meteorites than anybody had ever imagined. Yeah, interesting. And about the same time, people had gone to Antarctica and found meteorites on the Antarctic ice. And it turned out that in eastern New Mexico, Australian desert, the North African desert, and in Antarctica, there have been 60,000 meteorites recovered from these areas because the collecting is favorable. Not because there's more that fell there, but because the collecting is favorable. You can see it easily, and you can find them. When you're looking, what do you look for? How do I know it's a meteor or a fragment of a meteor and not a rock? Well, the easiest thing for somebody who has a little bit of practice to look for is this fusion crust. So it's a smooth crust, it's thin, it rounds off the edges of everything. If you have something that you think might be a meteorite, well, the other thing is it's only on the surface. So if you look at the outside and you look at the inside and they look the same except that the outside smooth, that's not a fusion crust, that's just a polished surface. Once you have something that you think might be a meteorite, you can sand off the outside with sandpaper or emery paper, not a file because a file is softer than the rock and you'll have file teeth in your rock, but you can then see the iron nickel metal. And so once you have iron nickel metal and something that has a kind of a fusion crust, you have a really good chance you've got a meteorite. It's not a condition that you would find in normal rocks. That is not, that's right, that's another very important point. The earth has oxygen, we breathe oxygen. Oxygen and metal don't get along as you probably know if you live in Hawaii, everything rusts. And it goes away in a few hundred to a few thousand years, even a chunk like this. So if you find natural metal, it's not from here, it's from somewhere else. So if you find the hunk of metal, to either a meteorite or somebody made it, those are the only options. And there's a lot of things that people made, but. Yeah, this is very, very interesting. And what I get from your story of exploration and discovery is that they're all over the place. We just didn't see them come down. Our backs were turned in some way. We didn't see them, but the earth is covered with them. And the only question is what techniques do you use to find them? Would something that found metal, a metal detector, for example, help you to find them? Yes, a metal detector will work. The kinds that are made of nickel iron actually detect as metal. The kind that have iron inside stone detect as what's called ore. So you have to set the setting for ore. The main disadvantage with a metal detector is it's got a head that's about this big. And you've got to sweep that head over the entire area that you're trying to search. That takes a really long time. So you're not very efficient. These guys that found tens and 140 meteorites used their eyes and basically could sweep tens of meters of ground in a second and look for these things. And you have to train yourself to look for the odd shapes and colors and all that. And if you're in Antarctica, the black rocks sit on the white or blue ice and it's really easy. You can stand in one place and say, there's one, half a mile that way. There's one, a quarter of a mile over there. There's three over there. And God knows how many are under the ice, you know, buried, you know, centuries ago under the ice. Exactly. We're going to take a short break. It won't be centuries. It'll be just one minute. Okay. Right back with Gary Haas. You'll see. Aloha. My name is Carl Kampania and I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Education Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I invite you to come watch our show on thinktechhawaii.com. You can also see our shows on YouTube as well. You can Google search those. I appreciate the time. I hope that you do join us as we learn about education, about the educational system here in Hawaii, what the challenges are, what the benefits are and how much our kids are learning. So thank you. Hope you join us. We're Tech. We're seeing you. Welcome and join us to see us on thinktechhawaii. Join my co-hosts, Gordon O. The Tech's out and enter the security guy every Friday from 1300 to 1345. We look forward to see you. We'll talk tech and we'll have some weeb of fun. And remember, let your winging free, where are you be. Aloha. Here on a Monday, one o'clock rock with research in Minoa with Gary Haas, professor of Cosmochemistry. And we're learning about his incredible collection of meteorite fragments. And at this point in the show, we're going to find out about the inferences that science can draw from these fragments. That's really exciting about the origins, the physical origins of the universe. Because we're not out there. We're not that close. We have telescopes and we have these. And that's all we got. That's right. So we got to make some jumps now. What do we find? How do we find it? Okay. So we've got these meteorites that basically fell, came from the asteroid belt and fell on Earth. They date from the very earliest times in the solar system. There are a group of them that are highly primitive that contain little pieces that existed in the solar system before the planets formed. So this rock here and the slide that's coming up have little round things called condrules in them. There you go. So there's all those round things. It's a cut surface. There's all the little round things floated around as free objects in the solar system in the very earliest times. The white ones are probably the oldest things to have formed in the solar system. And in between those, there is some really fine grained matrix that contains grains that formed around other stars at the ends of those stars' lives. So we'll back up one second. All of the elements that make up the Earth and us and the meteorites and whatever were formed in stars over the age of the universe. And they get ejected from the stars. And they're all on the periodic table of elements. There are. They're all out there in this universe that isn't on our periodic table of elements. As far as we know, that is correct. And those formed and those elements formed, got kicked out of stars and mixed together in the interstellar medium, made some more stars, which made some more elements, which blew up, made some more dust, which made an X generation of stars. So we're like the fourth generation. And we have in these meteorites some of the leftovers from the ejection of newly synthesized material from previous generations of stars. So we can look all the way back to where some of the elements that formed our solar system came from and look at the nucleosynthesis processes inside stars by measuring the compositions of these little grains. What's the nucleosynthesis process? Well, it's a process that takes hydrogen and helium and makes carbon or magnesium or iron out of it. And there are a bunch of different processes that you can study. Going much beyond what I just said starts getting really complicated. But basically you're taking hydrogen and helium, which came out of the big bang at the beginning. You're adding them together to make bigger and bigger elements. And we can measure how that was done by using an instrument we have at the University of Hawaii called an ion microprobe. And we can look at the composition, the number of isotopes. Isotopes are different atoms of the same element that weigh different amounts. They have different numbers of neutrons, the same number of protons. So we can calculate their relative abundances and that tells us how they formed. This sounds like looking at a tree and seeing the rings in the tree and trying to figure out the history of the tree over its life. That's essentially what the whole process of Cosmic Chemistry is doing, except the tree is these things. What I do is the first round thing in the tree at the very center. So now we're going to take the round thing in the center and we're going to see what happened to that. So we take that fine-grain material and in the solar system the star is trying to light up, the sun is trying to start burning. And it produces these little round condrules. So the condrules formed from this dust and they keep collecting and collecting and collecting. And as you saw in the picture and as you can see in this one here, if we zoom in on it, they're made up entirely, there we go, that's better, it's made up almost entirely of these condrules. How do you spell condrules? C-H-O-N-D-R-U-L-E-S. Condrules. Okay. And because they're making up these rocks like that, the rocks are called chondrites. So most meteorites are chondrites. And what we can do is we can look at the chondrules and we can figure out how long it took them to be formed. We know that it took about two million years or so. Here's another picture. Yeah, there's a chondrule. It's a melted droplet. It was a melted droplet in space and it crystallized from the melt to make all these little crystals. So the big one in the middle that's kind of pointy on one end is an olivine crystal. And the one above it that has all those little stripes across it is a pyroxene crystal. And you can tell from that what the composition of the melt was. How big is that? Is that actual size or...? That's about a millimeter across. So it's not very big. But we can also measure the isotopic compositions of some of those things and figure out how long it took it to form. We can date the formation events by using isotopes. Ah, because isotopes are dynamic. They change. Well, some of them are radioactive and decay, exactly. And so they decay to another isotope, which then builds up. And so you can compare the daughter and the parent or how much of the daughter that you have and you can build up a chronology. So we know what the material was. We don't know exactly what the processes were, but we know what the product of the processes were. We know when that turn took place. And then we have all these rocks that we put together from these things. So those things you can learn from every rock here? Exactly. And every inch of every rock has a lesson of some kind. That's pretty exciting. I mean, this is taking your family science way down the road. Yeah, it's way down the road from where it started. That's right. Well, let's look at some of these other guys here, because you get to that point and you have your chondrite. Now things happen to the chondrite. The asteroid accretes. It gets pretty big. Because of radioactivity, it starts getting hot. And as it gets hot, it starts to change. And so there's a slide up here that should be coming. There may be another chondrule in the way, but keep going there. So on the upper left, you can see chondrules. On the upper right, you can see chondrules. But on the bottom, it's really hard to see them. So what's happened is the rocks on the top were heated up and they changed into the rocks on the bottom. So you can see that they've been heated. Is that a melting process? Not yet. But it's going to be in a second. So you keep heating it up and you end up melting things and you end up with a rock like this. This is a basalt. Hawaii is made out of basalt. The composition of the two rocks is very similar. But this one's white. Hawaii's not white. Why do you suppose that is? I don't know. In the atmosphere has turned the iron to iron oxide, which does not transmit light. And so the earth ones are black and the other ones are white. And if you go to one more slide, I think, this is what it looks like on the inside. From that picture and that picture, you would not be able to tell whether that's from earth or from one of the asteroids. This rock is from the asteroid Vesta. And the next slide shows V-E-S-T-A. We just had a space mission that went there. So that's a picture of Vesta from the spacecraft. And this is a piece of it. So it came from there. And then the reason we know that is in the next picture because we can use infrared spectroscopy. So it's pattern matching. On the top is the pattern from the asteroid. This is different in addition to the measurement of the isotopes now. This is how we're going to say it actually came from this object. We don't have a sample that we collected from there. So we have to look at it remotely. And we shine. We don't shine. But we look at the light that's being reflected off of Vesta and measure it as a function of wavelength. And you get the pattern on the top. Then you get this rock. And you put it in a similar instrument. And you measure it on earth. And it's the same. Got to be from the same place. Well, that's the theory anyway. Sounds right to me. So that's how you can kind of fingerprint where these things came from. But what about all these metal ones? Yeah. This one basically doesn't have any metal left. And the reason it doesn't is because when the asteroid melted, the metal went to the core. The earth has a metal core. Mars has a metal core. Many of the asteroids have a metal core. And these are samples of the metal cores in many cases. And there's a few that aren't, but most of them are. And this one, which is half stone and half metal, may be the core mantle boundary of an asteroid. Or possibly of the earth the same way. Well, there's probably something similar in the earth that's unlikely to have come from the earth because we can't get it out from 2,000 miles now. But the process is the same. The heavy metal in the center. And you have this semi heavy metal crust around it. Yeah. Exactly. And we have this pretty little pattern here that we see on the inside of an iron. So this is sliced open. And it's been etched a little bit with weak acid so that you can see the pattern. And what happens is the core of the asteroid cools very, very, very slowly. It takes a long time for heat to radiate out from, or transmit out from the inside. We only have a minute left, Gary. But let me ask you this question going forward. Right now we know a certain amount. Right now we can make certain inferences about how solar systems were formed, about how meteorites came into play, how they got away from where they were and traveled. But what about the future of your science? What are the great challenges going forward? Tell us what you're going to be studying and how you're going to expand this analysis in the future. Well, there are the broad outlines of how the solar system formed. There are pretty big gaps in our knowledge still, where we make educated guesses and intuitive leaps. What's happening now is a new series of instruments are coming online that allow us to measure things at a smaller and smaller scale. There's a new transmission electron microscope lab at UH that's going to be involved in this. Measure these things. Measure some of these things. We'll find out more about these very same samples that your grandfather and father collected. There are treasures and secrets in them that we still haven't found unlocked yet. We still don't know everything there is to know. We know a heck of a lot more than we did 20 years ago, but there's a long ways to go to really start this out. That's great. That's great, Gary. I'm looking forward to hearing more from you about this. As you unlock those secrets. Kind of wheeled suitcase.