A meteor that strikes Earth’s surface is called a meteorite. The term “meteor” refers only to the streak of light you see in the sky. Once the object survives its fiery trip through the atmosphere and lands on the ground, it gets a new name. Understanding this distinction is the key to making sense of how scientists talk about space rocks at every stage of their journey.
Meteoroid, Meteor, and Meteorite
These three terms describe the same object at different points in its life. A meteoroid is a natural solid object in space, ranging from about 30 micrometers (smaller than a grain of sand) up to about one meter across. While it drifts through space, that’s all it is: a meteoroid.
The moment a meteoroid enters Earth’s atmosphere at high speed and begins to glow, the visible streak of light and all the associated physical effects (heat, ionization, shock waves) are collectively called a meteor. This is what most people call a “shooting star.” The solid object is still a meteoroid at this point. The word “meteor” technically describes the phenomenon, not the rock itself.
If any portion of that meteoroid survives the trip without being completely vaporized and reaches the ground, it becomes a meteorite. Most meteorites that people find are between the size of a pebble and a fist. So the short answer: a meteor that strikes Earth’s surface is a meteorite.
What Happens During Atmospheric Entry
The atmosphere is remarkably effective at destroying incoming space rocks. A meteoroid enters at speeds that can exceed 18 kilometers per second (roughly 40,000 miles per hour), and the compression of air in front of it generates extreme heat. Once the surface reaches about 2,200 Kelvin, thermal ablation kicks in, meaning the outer layers melt and vaporize away. This is the dominant source of mass loss for most meteoroids.
The vast majority of meteoroids ablate entirely before reaching the ground. They simply burn up, leaving nothing but dust and vapor in the upper atmosphere. Only the tougher, larger, or slower-moving objects retain enough mass to land as meteorites. The thin outer layer that melts during descent resolidifies into what scientists call a fusion crust, a black, glassy coating that is one of the telltale signs of a freshly fallen meteorite.
Despite the high destruction rate, a surprising amount of material still gets through. NASA estimates that about 48.5 tons of meteoritic material falls on Earth every day, though most of it arrives as tiny particles rather than recognizable rocks.
The Three Main Types of Meteorites
Scientists group meteorites into three broad categories based on composition:
- Stony meteorites are made mainly of silicate minerals, similar to rocks on Earth. They account for more than 95% of all observed meteorite falls.
- Iron meteorites are composed largely of metallic iron and nickel. They make up only a few percent of observed falls, but they’re overrepresented in collections because they look dramatically different from Earth rocks, resist weathering, and are easy to spot long after landing.
- Stony-iron meteorites contain roughly equal parts metal and rock. They’re the rarest group, making up less than 2% of all known meteorites.
How to Recognize a Meteorite
If you find a suspicious rock and wonder whether it fell from space, a few features are worth checking. A recently fallen meteorite will have a black, glassy fusion crust that looks like an eggshell coating the stone. Over years of exposure, this crust weathers to a rusty brown and eventually disappears altogether.
The surface is generally smooth but often has shallow, rounded depressions that resemble thumbprints pressed into wet clay. Scientists call these regmaglypts, and they form as softer material erodes unevenly during atmospheric entry. Iron meteorites tend to have especially well-developed thumbprint patterns across their entire surface.
Most meteorites contain at least some iron-nickel metal, which means they attract a magnet. Even stony meteorites, which have relatively little metal, will pull a magnet on a string. A simple refrigerator magnet can serve as a quick first test.
The Chelyabinsk Event
One of the most dramatic modern examples occurred on February 15, 2013, when an 18-meter-wide meteoroid entered the atmosphere over Russia at 18.6 kilometers per second (about 41,600 miles per hour). The 11,000-metric-ton space rock exploded 23.3 kilometers (14.5 miles) above the city of Chelyabinsk, producing a blinding flash and a massive shockwave that blew out windows across the region and injured over a thousand people.
Despite the midair explosion, surviving fragments reached the ground near the town of Chebarkul. One chunk weighing about 654 kilograms was later pulled from the bottom of a lake. The Chelyabinsk event illustrated that even when a meteoroid breaks apart high in the atmosphere, pieces can still make it to the surface as meteorites.
Where Meteorites Are Found
Meteorites fall everywhere on Earth, but finding them is far easier in certain environments. Antarctica is the single most productive region for meteorite recovery. The continent’s ice sheet acts as a natural collection system: meteorites that fell over thousands of years get buried in snow, carried by glacial flow, and eventually re-exposed in areas where wind erodes the surface ice. Because there’s almost no weathering in the cold, dry conditions, meteorites can sit on the surface for millennia and remain well-preserved. Their dark color makes them easy to spot against blue ice.
A recent data-driven study identified over 600 meteorite-rich zones in Antarctica, and researchers estimate that 300,000 to 850,000 meteorites remain on the ice sheet waiting to be collected. Hot deserts like the Sahara serve a similar role. Dry conditions slow weathering, and the flat, pale terrain makes dark meteorites stand out.
Why Meteorites Matter to Science
Meteorites are some of the oldest objects anyone can hold. Many formed at the same time as the solar system itself, roughly 4.6 billion years ago. Earth’s earliest geological record has been erased by plate tectonics, volcanic activity, and erosion, but meteorites have been drifting in space largely unchanged since they first formed. They preserve a chemical snapshot of the solar system’s earliest days.
Scientists determine meteorite ages by measuring the ratio of radioactive parent elements to the daughter elements they decay into. For finer time resolution, researchers use elements that decay rapidly. By tracking how isotopes like manganese-53 (which decays to chromium-53) and aluminum-26 (which decays to magnesium-26) are distributed in meteorite minerals, scientists have reconstructed events that happened within the first five to six million years of the solar system’s history. This includes working out when early asteroid-like bodies separated into layers of different composition, a process that set the stage for planet formation.
As planetary scientist Cyrena Anne Goodrich of the Planetary Science Institute has put it, without meteorites we would probably know very little about the beginnings of our solar system.