14 September 2025
By News Agency (Changchun) – When the trivialities of daily life obscure the starry sky above, the Jilin Meteorite Museum in Jilin City stands as a “cosmic time capsule,” safeguarding mysterious visitors from outer space and allowing people to get up close to traces of the universe and listen to stories spanning billions of years.
Stepping into the museum, the soft and dim lighting resembles the glow of stars in the night sky. Giant images of the Milky Way, Andromeda Galaxy and other celestial bodies on the walls instantly immerse visitors in the context of the vast universe. At the center of the exhibition hall, the “Jilin-1 Meteorite,” weighing 1,770 kilograms, looms like a small black mountain. Its surface is covered with gas pits – marks left by violent friction with high-temperature air currents when it passed through the Earth’s atmosphere. Every crevice is engraved with the thrilling interstellar journey it endured.
The story of this “star meteorite” began with the world-shocking Jilin Meteor Shower on March 8, 1976. At around 15:00 that day, a meteoroid from space approached Earth at a speed of 15-18 kilometers per second, entering the atmosphere from east to west. At an altitude of 70 kilometers near Jingpo Lake in Heilongjiang Province, the meteoroid rubbed against the atmosphere, generating temperatures of 2,000-3,000°C; the surrounding air was even heated to about 10,000°C, turning the meteoroid into a dazzling fireball. When it reached an altitude of 19.21 kilometers above the eastern part of Jiaohe County, the meteoroid exploded due to thermal stress and aerodynamic forces. The fragmented meteorites continued to fly at a speed of 14.2 kilometers per second, eventually forming a meteor shower in the area covering seven communes in the northern suburbs of Jilin City, Yongji County and Jiaohe County, with a distribution area of 480 square kilometers (72 kilometers long from east to west and 8.5 kilometers wide at its maximum from north to south).
What is remarkable is that despite covering multiple populated areas, this unprecedented meteor shower caused no casualties to humans or livestock. At that time, a total of 138 relatively large meteorites and more than 3,000 fragments were collected, with a total weight of 2,616 kilograms. Among them, the Jilin-1 Meteorite fell in Kaoshan Tun of Huapichang Town. It penetrated 1.7 meters of frozen soil and smashed into 6.5 meters of clay, creating a pit 3 meters deep and over 2 meters in diameter. The vibration caused by the impact was equivalent to a magnitude 1.7 earthquake, and the seismic waves were accurately recorded by the Jilin and Fengman seismological stations, freezing the crucial moment of “15:02:36 on March 8, 1976” in history.
Beside the Jilin-1 Meteorite, small meteorites of various shapes also attract visitors’ attention – some are round and smooth, while others have sharp edges. They either originate from the asteroid belt or were formed by cosmic collisions, drifting for billions of years before finally reaching Earth. The popular science boards in the exhibition hall systematically reveal the “origin” of the meteorites: the parent body of the Jilin Meteor Shower was a meteoroid weighing about 5 tons in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in the solar system, with an age equal to that of the solar system (about 4.6 billion years). Approximately 8 million years ago, a celestial collision caused it to break away from a depth of 20 kilometers on the surface of its parent body, forming an elliptical orbit with a perihelion of 140 million kilometers and an aphelion of 410 million kilometers. Due to the intersection of this orbit with Earth’s orbit, the “appointment with Earth” in 1976 came into being. These meteorites carry the most primitive material information of the solar system and are of inestimable value for studying the origin and evolution of the universe.
The 3D movie in the interactive experience area allows visitors to immerse themselves in the shock of the meteorite fall: the elliptical roof turns into a sky screen, the solar system emerges from chaos, a meteorite shuttles between stars and finally speeds toward the blue Earth. The flames in the atmosphere and the howling wind vividly recreate the scene of the 1976 meteor shower.
Walking out of the museum, one is filled with the intertwined feelings of the universe’s vastness and humanity’s insignificance. In the fast-paced present, this museum is like a window to the universe, allowing people to temporarily leave trivial matters behind, look up at the mysteries of the starry sky, and in the moment of touching the meteorite, complete a cross-temporal dialogue with the 4.6-billion-year-old universe.