meteorite

noun

me·te·or·ite ˈmē-tē-ə-ˌrīt

: a meteor that reaches the surface of the earth without being completely vaporized

meteoritic

ˌmē-tē-ə-ˈri-tik

adjective

or less commonly meteoritical

ˌmē-tē-ə-ˈri-ti-kəl

Examples of meteorite in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web Encouraged by that project, Loeb and Siraj started thinking about going after the Papua New Guinea meteorite. —

Seth Fletcher, New York Times, 24 Aug. 2023 While that meteorite started a whole new era, the working group is proposing that humans only started a new epoch, which is a much smaller geologic time period. —

Seth Borenstein, Anchorage Daily News, 11 July 2023 The hunt for an interstellar meteor yields surprising findings The fragments the team uncovered are believed to be from a basketball-sized meteorite that in 2014 slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere and into the western Pacific Ocean. —

Eric Lagatta, USA TODAY, 7 July 2023 War photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) merely notes that the alien stole the famous meteorite on display. —

WIRED, 19 June 2023 This includes meteorites, lunar rocks and even some of the very oldest rocks on Earth, which have all been determined to be around — surprise! —

Stephen C. George, Discover Magazine, 18 Apr. 2023 This hints that the meteorite was likely a IAB type and originally had a mass of at least two tons. —

Sara Kiley Watson, Popular Science, 3 Aug. 2023 Solar weathering produced water with this ratio in at least some of the meteorites that continuously rained down on early Earth. —

Melissa Gaskill, Popular Mechanics, 12 July 2023 For a 2022 paper in Science Advances, King and his colleagues analyzed the Winchcombe meteorite using spectroscopy. —

Joanna Thompson, Scientific American, 25 June 2023 See More

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'meteorite.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.