A metallic-looking rock that smashed through the roof of a residential home in Recent Jersey’s Hopewell Township earlier this week is indeed a meteorite — a rare one about 4.6 billion years old, scientists confirmed on Thursday (May 11).
“It was obvious instantly from it that it was a meteorite in a category called stony chondrite,” Nathan Magee, chair of the physics department at The College of Recent Jersey (TCNJ), whose office was contacted by the Hopewell Township police soon after the rock was found on Monday (May 8), told Space.com.
Chondrites are primitive rocks that make up 85% of meteorites found on Earth. Most chondrites found so far have been discovered in Antarctica; only rarely does one crash in populated areas.
Related: What are meteorites?
The Recent Jersey rock, which is about 6 inches long by 4 inches wide (15 by 10 centimeters), is a notable exception. It slammed into the Hopewell Township house, dented the floorboard, punched two holes within the ceiling and was still warm when it was discovered by Suzy Kop in her father’s bedroom around noon on Monday.
“I’m looking up on the ceiling and there is these two holes, and I’m like, ‘What on the earth has happened here?'” Kop told 6 ABC’s Trish Hartman (opens in latest tab).
Once emergency responders cleared Kop, her family and their home of any harmful radioactive residues, Kop handed over the space rock to the nearby college for further inspection.
At TCNJ, Magee’s team consulted Jerry Delaney, a retired meteorite expert who had worked on the meteorite collection on the American Museum of Natural History in Recent York. The team confirmed the space rock to be about 4.56 billion years old, which suggests it has been around for the reason that starting of our solar system and represents the leftover fragments from its creation.
The two.2-pound (0.9 kilograms) meteorite, which is able to likely be named Titusville, NJ — the postal address closest to its landing site — is “in excellent condition, and considered one of a really small number of comparable witnessed chondrite falls known to science,” Magee said in a statement on Thursday.
The highest layer of the meteorite has a blackened crust just a few millimeters thick from partially burning up in Earth’s atmosphere. Using a hand lens designed to take a look at rocks closely, his team found that the meteroite’s minerals are blue and grey in color, with a small amount of other metals mixed in, Magee told Space.com.
Rock, rock … who’s there?🪨 TCNJ physics professor Nate Magee confirmed today that the item that recently crashed landed right into a home not removed from campus is, indeed, from outer space. Read more from the @AP: https://t.co/e2zbpQyEfk@tcnjscience #tcnj #tcnjiseverywhere pic.twitter.com/FMXH5YtEeUMay 11, 2023
The team studied the rock’s texture and composition by placing it inside a big chamber of a scanning electron microscope. Based on initial estimates, the meteorite is a chondrite of sophistication LL-6, which has less iron than other members of its family and is not less than 30 to 40% denser than essentially the most common rocks on Earth, like slate or granite.
“So it was clear it was not an Earth rock,” Magee told Space.com.
Even before the space rock had breached Earth’s atmosphere, it was exposed to numerous heat in outer space that had heavily altered its structure and composition, a lot in order that it’s difficult to simply distinguish individual grains or chondrules that make up the meteorite, scientists shared in Thursday’s update (opens in latest tab).
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