A cherry tomato-sized fireball that crashed through the roof of a metro Atlanta house in June was a meteorite 20m years older than Earth, a scientist has determined.
In a news release on Friday, University of Georgia planetary geologist Scott Harris said that he arrived at that conclusion after examining 23 grams of fragments from a meteorite that were provided to him after the space rock pierced a man’s home and dented its floor in the Henry county community of McDonough.
Harris subsequently looked at the fragments under microscopes and established that they came from a meteorite which formed 4.56bn years earlier. Experts estimate the Earth is roughly 4.54bn years old.
“This particular meteor that entered the atmosphere has a long history before it made it to the ground of McDonough,” Harris said in the news release. He explained the space rock belonged to a group of asteroids “in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that we now think we can tie to a breakup of a much larger asteroid about 470m years ago”.
According to Harris, the homeowner reported to him that he has continued finding space dust specks around his living room from the asteroid strike.
Harris said he, his fellow University of Georgia scientists and colleagues at Arizona State University intend to submit their findings to the Meteorological Society’s nomenclature committee, which oversees naming new meteorites. Harris said his team has proposed to name its subject the McDonough Meteorite.
The University of Georgia said the meteorite studied by Harris and his colleagues was the 27th recovered in the history of the state, which was founded in 1788. It was among six meteorites in that group whose fall was witnessed.
“This is something that used to be expected once every few decades and not multiple times” in a relatively short time as has been the case, Harris said. “Modern technology in addition to an attentive public is going to help us recover more and more meteorites.”
Analyzing such space rocks is crucial for understanding the possible threat of much larger, more perilous asteroids, Harris added.
“One day there will be an opportunity, and we never know when it’s going to be, for something large to hit and create a catastrophic situation,” Harris remarked. “If we can guard against that, we want to.”
With respect to the case seen in McDonough, the meteorite hurtled to the ground at about 12.30pm, emitting a boom and rattling houses across Atlanta, officials said. Images and video of the fiery fireball – reportedly visible from North and South Carolina – spread quickly.
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The US’s National Weather Service didn’t initially recognize what had happened because the fireball resembled lightning on the agency’s global lightning mapper, an official said at the time.
Yet local emergency management director Ryan Morrison said officials began suspecting a meteorite when it became clear the fireball had punched through a home’s roof and cracked through the laminate flooring to the concrete.
The affected homeowner requested that the government withhold their identity because they have a small child, Morrison has said.
