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The dust bunnies that built our planet - Lorin Swint Matthews

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TEDEd Animation

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Consider the spot where you’re sitting. Travel backwards in time and it might’ve been submerged at the bottom of a shallow sea, buried under miles of rock or floating through a molten landscape. But go back about 4.6 billion years, and you’d be in the middle of an enormous cloud of dust and gas orbiting a newborn star. What exactly is this cosmic dust? Lorin Matthews investigates.

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We can’t actually travel back in time to see how our solar system formed. Instead, we study meteorites which land on earth, asteroids, and comets, all types of objects which we think have changed very little since they were first created in the early stages of planet formation. What other scientific questions do we try to answer by studying specimens which preserve data from the past?

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Meet The Creators

  • Educator Lorin Swint Matthews
  • Director Frederic Siegel
  • Narrator Addison Anderson
  • Animator Frederic Siegel
  • Sound Designer Frederic Siegel
  • Music Alon Peretz
  • Director of Production Gerta Xhelo
  • Editorial Producer Alex Rosenthal
  • Associate Editorial Producer Bethany Cutmore-Scott
  • Script Editor Emma Bryce
  • Fact-Checker Eden Girma

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