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anything.’
    It was the size of an orange but a very funny shape – kind of pointy on one side, where it had split from the original impactor, and curved on the other, where it had been superheated by friction with the Earth’s atmosphere. And on the jagged side, it was covered in small fissures and at least a dozen little craters, like tiny alien thumbprints. Dr Weir held it very gently, in both hands and close to her chest, as if it were some kind of fragile woodland creature. ‘Be careful, Alex,’ she said. ‘Remember that it’s much heavier than it looks.’
    I held my hands out like a shallow bowl. I was prepared for its weight, but I wasn’t prepared for how cold it was. My hands were still warm from being under my bottom and the iron–nickel meteorite felt like it had been pulled straight from the fridge.
    ‘It’s freezing!’ I gasped. ‘Is that because it’s from outer space?’
    Dr Weir smiled again. ‘Actually, Alex, it’s at room temperature. It just
feels
cold because it’s extremely conductive. It’s drawing a lot of heat from your hands. As to where it’s from, well, that’s one of the things we can be fairly certain about. It probably originated in the molten core of a large asteroid that was destroyed through collision billions of years ago. Do you know what an asteroid is?’
    ‘Asteroids are great big boulders in space,’ I said. ‘The
Millennium Falcon
had to fly through a whole field of them to get away from Darth Vader’s
Star Destroyer
.’
    Dr Weir nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, that’s right. But that was in a galaxy far, far away. In our solar system, most of the asteroids – and there are millions and millions of them – orbit the Sun in a wide belt between Mars and Jupiter.’
    At this point, Dr Weir drew me a detailed diagram showing the Sun, the planets and the Asteroid Belt. It wasn’t to scale, she said, but it was accurate enough for our purposes.
    ‘Now, Alex. Usually these asteroids don’t get anywhere near the Earth, as you can see. But occasionally, they get thrown out of their regular, stable orbits. Sometimes they collide like snooker balls, and sometimes they get captured by Jupiter’s enormous gravity and then launched on a whole new path round the Sun. As you probably know, Jupiter is extremely massive and has a very powerful gravitational field. Some of these captured asteroids will eventually impact with Jupiter, and some are thrown so far that they leave the solar system entirely. And some – a tiny, tiny percentage – become meteoroids. That is, they’re hurled onto an orbit that puts them on a direct collision course with the Earth.’
    Dr Weir drew on her diagram a little dotted line representing the hypothetical path of a disrupted asteroid crossing the Earth’s orbit. I thought that this was something my mother would have enjoyed looking at. She often talked about how the movements of the planets could affect events on Earth, but she’d never really explained how that worked. Dr Weir explained it much better.
    ‘Anyway,’ Dr Weir continued, ‘most of the asteroids that collide with the Earth are very tiny and are vaporized high in the upper atmosphere. But a few – like yours – are big enough and dense enough to make it all the way to the ground without vaporizing. And an even smaller number are so big and heavy that they’re hardly even slowed down by the atmosphere. They leave craters and create huge, incredibly destructive explosions. Most scientists agree that it was probably a meteor originating in the Asteroid Belt that killed all the dinosaurs.’
    I looked at the orange-sized meteorite in my hands. ‘I’m not sure that one meteor could have killed
all
the dinosaurs,’ I said sceptically.
    Then Dr Weir talked for a very long time about how the meteor that probably killed all the dinosaurs was much, much bigger than mine – probably at least ten miles wide – and how a meteor that big would have caused waves as high as