What colour are meteorites?
Most meteorites are black or dark brown on the outside. Inside, they can be grey, silver, black, white or even have green crystals.
If you picked up a fresh meteorite, the first thing you would notice is its colour. Most are covered in a thin black skin, rather like burnt toast. This skin is called the fusion crust. It forms when the outside of the space rock melts as it rushes through the air, and then cools into a glassy coat.
After a meteorite has been lying on the ground for a while, rain and air start to make it rusty, so the black crust often turns brown.
The inside is where things get exciting. Many stony meteorites are pale grey inside, sprinkled with tiny shiny specks of metal that sparkle like glitter. Some have little round balls in them called chondrules. Iron meteorites are silvery metal inside, and when scientists polish and treat a slice, it can show a beautiful criss-cross pattern. One special kind, called a pallasite, has golden-green crystals set in shiny metal, like a stained-glass window. Some meteorites from the asteroid Vesta are speckled grey and white, and a few rare meteorites are very dark, almost like charcoal, all the way through.
So meteorites are not all the same colour. Each one tells a story about where it came from.