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Here\u2019s what you\u2019ll learn when you read this story:<\/p>\n
A meteorite that plummeted into the roof and living room of a house in McDonough, Georgia, has now been found to be 20 million years older than Earth.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
Researchers who examined fragments of the broken meteorite now think that its parent body split from a monster asteroid (which formed before Earth) about 470 million years ago.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n
The McDonough meteorite is only the size of a cherry tomato, but its trajectory and velocity could tell us more about larger impacts and prepare us to possibly thwart them.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
On the afternoon of June 26, 2025, something otherworldly streaked through the sky over Georgia and South Carolina. It was glowing in broad daylight.<\/p>\n
Whatever it was hurtled through the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound and generated sonic boom after sonic boom. Then, after a sudden crash, one homeowner in the metro Atlanta city of McDonough found that a cherry-tomato-sized meteor fragment had punched through his roof and HVAC duct before leaving a dent in his living room floor, kicking up a cloud of dust on impact. He had no idea if insurance would cover damage done by a space rock that turned out to be older than Earth itself.<\/p>\n
When University of Georgia planetary geologist Scott Harris got his hands on specimens and dust from the offending meteorite<\/a> (which had missed the shocked homeowner\u2019s head by about the length of an average sedan), he discovered that it was an exploded meteor that couldn\u2019t make it to the Earth\u2019s surface in one piece and scattered. Harris and his colleagues had been gauging its velocity while they watched it descend as a fireball, or bolide, that burned bright as it overheated from atmospheric friction, setting surrounding gases ablaze. Then they observed what was left with optical and electron microscopy that began to reveal its past.<\/p>\n Some 470 million years ago, the meteor that had perished above McDonough is thought to have broken off an asteroid<\/a> orbiting in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That behemoth had formed 20 million years before Earth existed. Earth is around 4.54 billion years old. That makes the meteorite 4.56 billion years old.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of these asteroids have undergone a lot of collisions, a lot of internal damage, billions of years before they encounter Earth,\u201d Harris said in a UGA video release<\/a> that shows the meteorite and its aftermath. \u201cSo we think it may have been traveling many many hundreds of meters per second, even up to as much as one kilometer per second as it went through the house.\u201d<\/p>\n Now known as the McDonough Meteorite, this fragment still had so much energy by the time it busted through the ceiling that it pulverized some of the wood paneling on the floor. Harris found it to be a Low Metal (L type) ordinary chondrite. Meteorites<\/a> that are classified as ordinary chondrites have a high percentage of roundish embedded mineral grains. These were once floating molten drops that collided with existing rocks and each other, accreting and forming asteroids. As if witnessing the cosmic spectacle was not enough, chondrules are a giveaway that a rock is from space because they are not found in rocks which form on Earth<\/a>.<\/p>\n L type ordinary chondrites are extremely common, but few meteorites have come that close to a human bein<\/a>g. In 2021, Ruth Hamilton of British Columbia, Canada, was startled awake in bed by what sounded like an explosion, only to find out<\/a> a meteorite larger than her fist had landed between her flowered pillows. Meteorites have collided with more houses before, including everything from cars to cows, but the first known meteorite to hit a human<\/a> struck Ann Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama, in 1954 while she was dozing on her sofa. She was left with a bruise on her hip. The Hodges Meteorite now resides in the Alabama Museum of Natural History.<\/p>\n Meteorites that hit Earth are usually chunks of fractured asteroids. In the process of the larger rocks breaking up, some pieces drift into orbits that cross Earth and may eventually shift to Earth\u2019s orbit<\/a> as they journey around the Sun. Harris thinks the McDonough impact could give us an idea of how to guard against asteroids that might threaten us.<\/p>\n