Cherry tomato-sized space rock that pierced roof and hit floor of metro Atlanta home is 20m years older than Earth
A cherry tomato-sized fireball that crashed through the roof of a metro Atlanta house in June was a meteorite 20m years older than Earth, a scientist has determined.
In a news release on Friday, University of Georgia planetary geologist Scott Harris said that he arrived at that conclusion after examining 23 grams of fragments from a meteorite that were provided to him after the space rock pierced a man’s home and dented its floor in the Henry county community of McDonough.
Harris subsequently looked at the fragments under microscopes and established that they came from a meteorite which formed 4.56bn years earlier. Experts estimate the Earth is roughly 4.54bn years old.
“This particular meteor that entered the atmosphere has a long history before it made it to the ground of McDonough,” Harris said in the news release. He explained the space rock belonged 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 470m years ago”.
