SEEING STARS… AND SO MUCH MORE

Somewhere in the cosmic void between Mars and Jupiter, around 111 million miles from Earth, there floats a hulking, rocky lump named Vesta. It’s one of the largest bodies in the asteroid belt, with a surface area the size of a small moon and temperatures that drop to-200C. Back down on Earth, it’s 2am, I’m in a warm room on a dark hilltop in Northumberland, and a sliced fragment of Vesta is resting in my palm.

“I love space rocks,” says Ellie Macdonald, one of the science communicators at Kielder Observatory, encouraging me to study the interplanetary interloper under a microscope. “They’re the most tangible form of astronomy.” On the table around us are other long-distance travellers — little chunks of the lunar surface, and even Mars — all of which have arrived here in meteorite form. They represent not so much a collection of high-value rocks as a kind of solar system reunion.