That headline: "Finding meteorites in your gutters is easy"!
Iron space dust that is fine enough to escape incineration as “shooting stars” when entering Earth's atmosphere drifts down continuously. To collect these small iron spheres, scrape several handfuls of mud from a convenient roof gutter, preferably a plastic one, add to a bucket of water and stir.
Fish for meteorites with a strong magnet wrapped in a plastic bag. Remove the magnet, carefully rinse the bag into a glass dish and look for fine, dark grey dust. Dragging the magnet underneath will concentrate the dust. A good magnifier will show tiny spheres, some of them up to 0.2 millimetres in diameter.
Meteorites this large are rare, and extremely helpful to the scientific community, considering that going straight to the source is the only other way to retrieve samples. It's spooky because it could mean a huge discovery that's not being realized.
"The meteorite broke up over Kentucky and passed over West Virginia and Pennsylvania on its north-northeast trajectory before striking a parked 1980 red Chevy Malibu at approximately 7:50 pm EDT. After traveling through space at a cosmic velocity of 8.8 miles per second (14 km/s, 31,600 miles per hour), the speed of the meteorite at impact had slowed to 164 miles per hour (264 km/h)."
The meteorite was worth way more than the price of a new Malibu. And the Malibu itself sold at auction for way more, too. So, hope every day to have your car struck by a meteorite.
