On January 18, a meteor lit up the skies above the Yukon. More astounding than the celestial light show is the fact that a few pieces of space rock fell through the atmosphere without burning up, then settled into the Canadian snow. The anonymous local who discovered these fragments of carbonaceous chondrite slipped the samples into plastic bags and kept them frozen - minimizing the loss of organic and other vaporous compounds - then turned them over to scientists at the Geological Survey of Canada and NASA in pristine condition.
The tennis-ball-sized meteorites, thought to be 4.5 billion years old, offer a snapshot of the solar system before the planets formed. "It's likely the meteorites contain unaltered grains that formed the universe, what we call 'stardust,'" says Michael Zolensky, a cosmic mineralogist at NASA. The samples also contain H2O bound inside organic compounds, which supports the theory that water was first brought to Earth by meteorites and, as Zolensky says, "shows us the possibilities of life elsewhere - like the moons of Jupiter."
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