“This is where it all began,” professor Paul Sipiera said as he pointed to the projected image of a solar nebula.

Speaking at Kishwaukee College Monday evening, Sipiera was referring to the creation of some of the objects he has devoted much of his career to studying: meteorites.

Sipiera is a professor of geology and astronomy at Harper College in Palatine. He recently completed a month-long expedition to Antarctica to search for meteorites.

“It’s brutal. We were living in an environment that is totally alien to us,” Sipiera said. “We’re not covered in seal skin, or feathers like a penguin. We really had to fend for ourselves.”

“Antarctica is still one of the best places in the world to find meteorites in exciting numbers,” Sipiera said.

Meteorites are essentially rocks from space that were large and strong enough to survive a trip through the earth’s atmosphere and land intact.

“If you take a 26-pound chunk of iron and throw it in a field in northern Illinois, it will probably last around a few hundred years,” Sipiera said. “But meteorites in Antarctica last around 400,000 years simply because Antarctica really doesn’t melt. Temperatures are always below freezing, and there is very little direct interaction with water, so they tend to stay pretty pristine over time. So even though Antarctica doesn’t receive more meteorites than anywhere else, it holds onto them.”

Additionally, ice always is moving from south to north, he said, so if a meteorite falls, it will reach the oceans in time. If there is a mountain chain in front of the ice movement, the meteorites settle at the base.

These locations are called ice stranding fields, and Sipiera and his team spent much of their trip searching these areas.

Sipiera is a member of the Planetary Studies Foundation, a group whose goal is to promote planetary study with an emphasis on meteorites. The group’s current membership is about 200 people, including eight astronauts.

Sipiera’s lecture was coordinated by Linda Gruber, an English instructor at Kishwaukee College and coordinator of international education. About 160 people attended the event.

“I’m a listener of WGN Radio in Chicago, and many times in January, I heard professor Sipiera being interviewed from Antarctica, and I thought ‘what a neat story,’” Gruber said. “I approached him about coming to speak at [Kishwaukee], and the rest has evolved into tonight.”

Sipiera, along with nine other members of the PSF, spent nearly a month, from Jan. 2 through the 28, searching the ice for meteors.

“Our camp this year was 70 degrees west and 85 degrees south, which put us about 330 miles off the South Pole, in the direction of Newfoundland,” Sipiera said.

He said the team worked a pretty normal day, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., making a morning and afternoon shift.

“In Antarctica, time means nothing,” Sipiera said. “We were sometimes eating dinner around 9 p.m.”

In regards to his team’s methods, he said members did both a foot search and searches from snowmobiles. The largest meteorite they found was the size of a lemon, while the smallest was resembled a person’s little fingernail, weighing only 0.2 grams.

“In seven days of field searching, we found 33 meteorites, of which three are particularly exciting,” Sipiera said. “One is a probable Mars meteorite.”

Sipiera said the suspected Mars meteorite has large pyroxene crystals and a black fusion crust. Meteorites are most identifiable by the presence of a fusion crust, which is produced by the heat that results from entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

“Chemical analysis of this meteorite will be conducted this summer, either at NASA Johnson or at the University of Arizona, at their Lunar Planetary Laboratory,” Sipiera said.

“There is, of course, never any luck involved in finding these meteorites,” Sipiera said with a joking grin. “It’s all skill.”