A meteorite crashed into a Georgia home. Scientists say it's older than the Earth itself
Onlookers in the Southeast were stunned when a fireball streaked across the sky on June 26.
Fragments of the meteorite hurtled into the roof of a homeowner in McDonough, Henry County, just south of Atlanta, leaving behind a hole the size of a golf ball in the ceiling and a dent in the floor.
Scott Harris, a researcher in the University of Georgia's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences' department of geology, has been studying the fragments and believes the meteorite formed 4.56 billion years ago. The Earth is thought to be 4.543 billion years old.
'This particular meteor that entered the atmosphere has a long history before it made it to the ground of McDonough, and in order to totally understand that, we actually have to examine what the rock is and determine what group of asteroids it belongs to,' Harris said in a university news release.
Using optical and electron microscopy to analyze the fragments, Harris said he believes the meteorite to be a low metal ordinary Chondrite.
'It belongs 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 470 million years ago,' Harris said. 'But in that breakup, some pieces get into Earth-crossing orbits, and if given long enough, their orbit around the sun and Earth's orbit around the sun end up being at the same place, at the same moment in time.'
The sound and vibration the meteor made was equivalent to a close-range gunshot. The homeowner told Harris he's still finding specks of space dust around his living room from the collision.
'I suspect that he heard three simultaneous things,' Harris said. 'One was the collision with his roof, one was a tiny cone of a sonic boom and a third was it impacting the floor all in the same moment. There was enough energy when it hit the floor that it pulverized part of the material down to literal dust fragments.'
The meteorite, which has been named McDonough, is the 27th to be recovered in Georgia's history.
'This is something that used to be expected once every few decades and not multiple times within 20 years,' Harris said. 'Modern technology in addition to an attentive public is going to help us recover more and more meteorites.'
Additional pieces of the meteorite that fell in the area will be displayed to the public at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville.
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