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Francisco Jose Testa, Lecturer in Earth Sciences (Mineralogy, Petrology & Geochemistry), University of Tasmania

Not just space rocks: 6 things we’ve learned about Earth from meteorites and comets

Photomicrograph of a chondrite meteorite. Francisco Testa/From the author's personal collection

Apart from the Sun, its planets and their moons, our Solar System has vast amounts of space rocks – fragments left over from the formation of the inner planets.

A large concentration of asteroids forms a vast ring around our Sun, orbiting it between Mars and Jupiter. Fittingly, it’s called the main asteroid belt. Comets are icy bodies of dust and rocks that originated even farther away – in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune and the Oort Cloud of debris surrounding the Solar System.

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