How we proved this tiny rock came from space

Back in February, I spent a few hours crawling around on my hands and knees on a rooftop in Brooklyn, New York. What I was looking for was smaller than the period at the end of this sentence: nearly invisible micrometeorites that may — or may not — have fallen from space. Surprisingly, I actually found some. I think.

With the help of a powerful neodymium magnet, some plastic sandwich bags, and a lot of patience, I was able to scrounge up about fifteen cosmic candidates — a process that we documented in our first micrometeorite video.

But finding the samples ultimately proved to be the easy part. Trying to verify their origin turned out to be an entirely different ordeal. Here at Verge Science, we simply didn’t have the capacity to...

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