You might have heard that meteorites are super rare, but they're actually everywhere.

They're just tiny. All the time the Earth is coming across dust particles from asteroids or comets.

And when the dust crosses the atmosphere, it doesn't like, settle across your TV, it forms those beautiful and ephemeral shooting stars. They burn up in the atmosphere, but not completely. And more than a ton land on earth as micro-meteorites.

And scientists estimate that we get about 5200 tons of those un-melted micro-meteorites per year, which for reference, an adult hippo weighs about 5 tons, so that would be more than 900 hippos of space dust! But as the name suggests, these are teeny tiny, measuring around 30-200 micrometers, which is less than a single grain of salt. So how did scientists figure that out then, if they're tiny?

How did they find them? Well, they go to Antarctica. Where's there's just a blanket of whiteness, and you can see those tiny specks  in the snow, and they extrapolated from that for the rest of the planet.