Meteoriticist

The following is a not-too-imaginary conversation between a meteoriticist and an important on-the-spot witness to a fireball that went soaring over his alfalfa patch.

In spite of this reservation, most meteoriticists now accept extinct aluminum-26 as the most likely source of heat for the meteorite parent bodies: it was abundant when the solar system formed, and it decayed fast enough to account for the intense but brief thermal histories of most meteorites.

Most of the meteoriticists who "discover" new meteorites depend on someone from the general public to bring in a strange rock they have encountered.