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Asked by enuf532kaon83 to niamhtopping, pratibhagautam, joshuahollowood on 11 Nov 2025. This question was also asked by fuzz532wyte6.
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Niamh Topping answered on 11 Nov 2025:
If you’re imagining something glowing green or blue and emitting radiation, no! I would say sadly not but it would be bad for us researchers if they were…much like rocks on Earth though, they do contain tiny amounts of radioactive material in the form of decaying elements like Uranium, but these are very small quantities! But radio isotopes are really useful for dating meteorites aka finding out how old they are
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Pratibha Gautam answered on 26 Feb 2026:
Most meteorites are not dangerously radioactive and are safe to hold! While they do have a tiny bit of “space radiation” from traveling past stars, it is usually even less than what you would find in a normal Earth rock or a banana. By the time they land on Earth, they are perfectly safe to keep in a collection.
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