By Danya Gainor for CNN
Fragments of a meteorite that are being analyzed by University of Georgia researcher Scott Harris. Photo: Andrew Davis Tucker/University of Georgia
A meteorite that tore through the sky in June shaking the US Southeast with a sonic boom is now believed to be 4.56 billion years old, according to researchers who studied it following its crash landing.
Fragments of the extraterrestrial rock were turned over to scientists after they fell to Earth this summer to determine their classification and origin.
The University of Georgia received 23 of the 50 grams of the McDonough Meteorite, named after the Georgia city where it ripped through the roof and ceiling of a home, according to the university.
"This particular meteor that entered the atmosphere has a long history before it made it to the ground of McDonough," Scott Harris, a researcher in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences' department of geology, said in the news release.
Harris determined the meteorite to be a Low Metal (L) ordinary Chondrite - a type of stony meteorite - and thus 20 million years older than Earth by "using optical and electron microscopy", the university said.
"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 in the release. "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."
UGA is also working with partners at Arizona State University to submit the meteorite's name and findings to the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society, Harris said. Harris also plans to publish a scientific paper about the rock to further understand the potential threats meteorites pose.
"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. If we can guard against that, we want to," he said.
A rare daytime fireball
The American Meteor Society received numerous reports of a fireball over the region on 26 June, CNN previously reported. The reports came during the Bootids meteor shower, a lower-level celestial event that was ongoing during the last week of June.
A Henry County, Georgia, resident had reported at the time that a rock - which would later be identified as the McDonough Meteorite - fell through their ceiling around the same time the June fireball occurred, according to the National Weather Service in Peachtree City. The object had broken through the roof and ceiling before cracking the flooring inside the home.
"I suspect that he heard three simultaneous things. 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," Harris said in the news release. "There was enough energy when it hit the floor that it pulverized part of the material down to literal dust fragments."
The resident told Harris he was still finding specks of space dust around his living room from the collision, according to the university. The rock is the 27th meteorite in history recovered in Georgia and the sixth witnessed fall.
Seeing a daytime fireball is a rare occurrence: Fireballs are easier to view at night, but must be much brighter to be visible during the day, the American Meteor Society says. It's also "quite rare" for sonic booms to be heard on the ground when a fireball occurs, according to the organization.
A fireball is an unusually bright meteor that reaches a magnitude over -4, which is brighter than Venus, according to the American Meteor Society. June's fireball reached a magnitude of around -14, the society told CNN, which would have made it brighter than the full moon.
It didn't take the McDonough space rock pummeling through roofs for others to spot it.
Brenda Eckard, 64, from Gilbert, South Carolina, previously told CNN she was driving home that June day when she saw a "big flash in the sky come down and disappear."
She first thought it was a meteor that "almost looked like a firework," Eckard said. Eckard then called her husband to check if their house was still standing.
The McDonough Meteorite is being stored at UGA for continued tests, according to UGA Today. Other pieces of it that fell on 26 June will be publicly displayed at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, Georgia.
- CNN
