Meteorites, A Windows Into Both Time And Space

Presented by Jason Utas

Please join us on November 11 at 7:30 PM in the Multipurpose Room at the Veterans Memorial Complex, 4117 Overland Ave, Culver City 90230 for a presentation on meteorites by Jason Utas.

The talk will cover meteorites, where they come from, and what they tell us about our place in the universe. We’ll take a look at different types of meteorites and how they formed. Also, how to find them.

Meteorites are windows into both time and space. The oldest meteorites are roughly 4.56 billion years old: they are made of small mineral grains that collected on the surfaces of asteroids in our young protoplanetary disk. These rocks also captured rare presolar grains – tiny mineral grains that formed in and around other stars, before our Sun. These have taught us a lot about our young Solar System’s “neighborhood” and our protoplanetary disk.

The youngest meteorites are volcanic basalts that crystallized just ~180 million years ago. Because of them, we think that the enormous volcanoes on Mars might still be active.

We will have a look at these, and everything in-between.

Jason liked rocks from a young age, and was a member of CCRMC in the late 1990s-early 2000s. His parents, Peter and Barbara, gave him a small meteorite for his eighth birthday, and space rocks quickly became a family affair. Jason went on to obtain a BA in geology from Cal in 2013, and an MS in geochemistry at UCLA in 2016. He is still finishing up a PhD there, in geochemistry / meteoritics. Jason has classified and published a few dozen new meteorites and has found many, mostly in the American Southwest. Some specimens from the collection are displayed at Griffith Observatory and UCLA’s Meteorite Gallery.