Meteorite that crashed into couple’s home gives up its secrets

At 11:17 a.m. on July 16, 2024, an asteroid shot into the sky over New York City. Images of the fireball and reports of the thunderous sonic boom that followed came from as far away as Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.

But no one reported them getting stuck in the ground. At the time, NASA said the rock responsible for the noise, estimated to be about 30 centimeters long, was so small it “could not survive the ground.” It was thought to have completely evaporated during its violent dive into the Earth’s atmosphere.

The owners of a home in Hillsborough, New Jersey, would beg to differ. At 11.20am the same day, a man working in his home office was rudely interrupted. “I heard a tremendous crash and felt the house shaking,” he said. It was as if all the kitchen cabinets had suddenly fallen off the walls.

After regaining her composure, she moved towards the master bedroom. “I open the door and see a hole in the ceiling above my bed,” he said.

The air smelled like rotten, sulphurous eggs mixed with fine dust. Black soot was found on every horizontal and vertical surface. When the man looked at the pillow, he saw several onyx-colored rocks.

“I’m glad I didn’t sleep,” he said. (The homeowners requested anonymity to avoid revealing the exact location of their homes.)

The asteroid had a mass of 52 kilograms before reaching Earth (calculated based on the brightness of the fireball, the object’s speed, and the sonic boom). Most of it disappeared as it traveled through the atmosphere at a speed of 51,499 km/h. But one large piece completed its journey to New Jersey, where the hosts spent weeks carefully collecting about 1.4 kilograms of extraterrestrial material.

Although they shared their findings with scientists, the couple kept their discovery secret from the public for two years.

Now, a new study published Wednesday in the journal Science Developments It reveals that the space rock is not an ordinary example. It contains complex organic molecules and tantalizing evidence of salt water; components on which life as we know it has developed. Asteroids much like the Hillsborough example may have carried the same important compounds to the nascent Earth billions of years ago.

“That makes this meteorite very special,” said Peter Jenniskens, a planetary astronomer and asteroid expert at the SETI Institute in California and one of the authors of the new study.

This type of meteorite is also quite fragile and prone to environmental contamination. The preservation of much of it almost intact was due to the diligence and agility of the two homeowners. “They had secured the scene, if you will,” Jenniskens said.

Thanks to their efforts, the scientific community has an extraordinary and extraordinary relic from the solar system’s past that will amaze. “This is what we’ve always dreamed of,” said Ashley King, a meteorologist at London’s Natural History Museum who was not involved in the new research.

When the homeowner first encountered the hole in his roof, he and his partner couldn’t figure out what caused it. An animal? Something that fell from a plane? However, after hearing the news about the fireball and sonic boom, they realized that the commotion in their bedroom might have originated from outer space.

First they called the police, then the fire department. Both politely refused to help.

While researching meteor falls online, one of the hosts came across Mike Hankey, an amateur astronomer with the American Meteor Society and co-author of the new study, who captured the 2024 meteor using the AllSky7 network of fireball-seeking camera stations. The couple contacted him via email and had a phone conversation the next day.

Hankey was ecstatic and offered his congratulations to the stunned couple. From the homeowners’ brief description of the debris, he knew that a strange type of meteorite, valuable both scientifically and financially, had crashed into their bedroom. “At least $100,000 [$143,000] I just came through your roof,” he recalled telling the homeowners: “You have to take good care of this. “Every piece of dust you find has value.”

The hosts avoided telling anyone about their celestial visitors except close family members. Trusting Hankey’s advice, the homeowners removed every speck of meteor dust they could find and placed the samples in glass containers to keep them dry. They used tape to peel microscopic bits off the walls and bought a new vacuum cleaner to suck up cosmic particles from the carpet. Each find was itemized, labeled and preserved.

“We were extremely meticulous,” said one of the homeowners. “The only thing we were missing was hazmat suits.”

Scientists determined that the meteorite was a special type of space rock called CM chondrite. “These are primitive meteors,” said meteor physicist Peter Brown of Western University in Ontario, who was not involved in the new study. “They are similar to the chemistry that forms planets.”

Meteorite hunters had collected several hundred CM chondrites in the past century, but many were found long after they reached the ground. This meant that they were exposed to the Earth’s elements, leaving them in a somewhat degraded state. A few that were captured immediately, such as the Hillsborough meteorite, retained much of their former chemistry.

In addition to containing prebiotic chemical compounds, the meteorite also shows intriguing signs of mineral alteration due to salt water. Something similar was detected in rock samples taken directly from asteroids Ryugu and Bennu in recent years by robotic space missions run by Japan’s space agency and NASA, respectively.

This suggests that the Hillsborough meteorite came from a larger object with flowing water inside it. “It’s really cool; it’s really exciting,” King said.

Based on the asteroid’s composition, its fall trajectory, and its exposure to solar and cosmic radiation as it moved through space, the study’s authors believe it was the first fragment of a massive asteroid called 163 Erigone that formed in the cold shadows beyond Jupiter. About 155 million years ago, another large object collided with it and a new family of asteroids was formed. This includes the peanut-shaped asteroid named Donaldjohanson, which NASA’s Lucy spacecraft photographed in 2025.

Then, 6 million years ago, a member of this asteroid family collided with another asteroid, causing it to break into several smaller rocks. One of them escaped from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and began flying near Earth. Then, about 200,000 years ago, a 52-kilogram piece broke off. His adventure ended when he destroyed a roof in New Jersey.

It was miraculous that any of these pieces reached the planet’s surface. This particular type of meteorite “looks like a full ball of mud,” Hankey said. Weather radar data shows pebble-sized chunks fell over a wide area between Staten Island and Hillsborough, but none were found during several weeks of searching, in part because rain had turned them into a muddy slush.

All things considered, it was a coincidence that a large piece ended up in someone’s bedroom. “If this had fallen in a wooded area, it probably might never have been found,” Brown said.

Modest repair costs aside, New Jersey residents still can’t believe their luck. By a cosmic twist of fate, they had purchased the house just a few months before their formidable visitor arrived.

“We closed on the house in January 2024,” one homeowner said. “And in July, we had a new resident.”

This article was first published on: New York Times.