A metallic-looking rock that smashed through the roof of a residential home in New 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 right away from looking at it that it was a meteorite in a class called stony chondrite,” Nathan Magee, chair of the physics department at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), whose office was contacted by the Hopewell Township police soon after the rock was found on Monday (May 8), told Space.com.
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“I’m looking up on the ceiling and there’s these two holes, and I’m like, ‘What in the world has happened here?'” Kop told 6 ABC’s Trish Hartman.
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“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 a lot of heat in outer space that had heavily altered its structure and composition, so much so that it is difficult to easily distinguish individual grains or chondrules that make up the meteorite, scientists shared in Thursday’s Update.
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Article URL : https://www.space.com/meteorite-strike-new-jersey-house-confirmed