This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. It’s currently being manned by Jeremy Freed, watch writer extraordinaire, while Cam is on parental leave. Sign up here.

Here at B+P we’re not afraid to ask big questions. Among them, what’s the best size for a watch? How do you order an off-menu Rolex? And where does life come from? The answers to the first two questions are relatively straightforward (respectively, 36mm and buy a lot of other watches first). The third is a bit more of a head-scratcher, but the answer might make you want to start shopping for a new timepiece—specifically one with a dial made from meteorite.

As you’ve probably noticed from GQ’s eagle-eyed watch coverage, meteorite dials are having a big moment these days. In addition to meteorized versions of classics like the Rolex Daytona and Omega Speedmaster, high-end indie brands like Sartory Billard and J.N. Shapiro have gotten in on the space-rock craze, as have Bulova, Zodiac, and a growing number of microbrands.

It’s easy to understand why meteorite watches have become so popular. For starters, meteorites come from space, and owning something that comes from space is, for lack of a better word, cool. For another, the type of meteorite used by most of these brands features a distinctively striated finish known as a Widmanstätten pattern. Created by the rapid cooling of molten iron and nickel in the icy vacuum of space, the Widmanstätten pattern lends each watch a unique, abstract expressionist look, and no two pieces are exactly the same. A meteorite, however, isn’t your average stone dial. Beneath the surface—both literally and figuratively—these rocks contain clues to understanding the origins of life on earth, and perhaps the universe itself.

“Most people, if they think about nature, they think about national parks, but nature doesn’t stop at the edge of our atmosphere,” says Philipp Heck, the senior director of research at the Field Museum in Chicago. “Most of nature is outside of Earth, and meteorites are part of that.”

Founded in 1893, the Field Museum contains the largest meteorite collection held by a private institution, with more than 12,000 specimens from over 1,600 meteorites. Some are chunks of the moon chipped off by long-ago asteroid collisions, some are pieces of Mars, some come from the outer edges of the solar system, and hidden away in each one is a piece of the story of our universe. Since most meteorites were created around the same time as our solar system, roughly 4.5 billion years ago, they hold an incredible amount of information—much of it yet undiscovered—about how our planet was born, how life on earth began, and countless other questions about the history of, well, everything. “That’s why studying this is fascinating, because it tells us about our origin story and our place in the cosmos,” Heck says. “The more we study meteorites, the more we realize how little we know.”