A meteorite that crashed into a house in Georgia in June is older than the earth itself, according to scientists who study the space stone.
Spectators in the southeast were stunned when a fireball shot over the sky on 26 June.
Fragments of the meteorite ran in the roof of a homeowner in McDonough, Henry County, just south of Atlanta, leaving a hole the size of a golf ball in the ceiling and a dent in the floor.
Scott Harris, a researcher at the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Geology of the University of Georgia, has studied the fragments and believes that the meteorite formed 4.56 billion years ago. The earth is considered 4,543 billion years old.
“This specific meteor that entered the atmosphere has a long history before it has achieved the ground of McDonough, and to fully understand that, we must actually investigate what the rock is and determine which group of asteroids it belongs,” Harris said in a university press release.
Using optical and electron microscopy to analyze the fragments, Harris said he believes that the meteorite is a normal chondriet with a layer of metal.
“It belongs to a group of asteroids in the most important asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that we think we can now bind to a collapse of a much larger asteroid about 470 million years ago,” Harris said. “But in that apart, some pieces come in on earth, and if they are given long enough, their lane around the sun and the earth around the sun end in the same place, at the same time in time.”
The sound and the vibrations that the meteor made was the same as a shot up close. The homeowner told Harris that he still finds speckles of space stuff around his living room of the collision.
“I suspect he heard three simultaneous things,” Harris said. “One was the collision with his roof, one was a small cone of a sonic tree and a third was that it influenced the floor at the same time. There was enough energy when it hit the floor that it hit part of the material to literal dust ragments.”
The meteorite, which is called McDonough, is the 27th that is restored in the history of Georgia.
“This is something that was expected once every few decades and not several times within 20 years,” said Harris. “Modern technology In addition to an attentive audience, we will help us recover more and more meteorites.”
Extra pieces of the meteorite that fell into the area are shown to the public in the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville.
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