A meteor streaked across the New York City area in broad daylight on July 16, 2024, producing a sonic boom as it passed just south of the Statue of Liberty. Not long afterward, a meteorite weighing more than two pounds punched through the roof of a home in Hillsborough, New Jersey. An international research team has now analyzed the recovered material and reported its findings in Science Advances.
"A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a primitive asteroid where it experienced concentrated salty fluids -- a process not previously known from this type of proto-planet world," said lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley.
A Meteor Tracked Across the Northeast
The object that entered Earth's atmosphere that day was roughly the size of a heavy airline bag and was traveling at 32,000 miles/h (14.4 kilometers per second). Sixty people across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania reported seeing the meteor to the American Meteor Society. Sixteen people in New York and New Jersey also reported feeling the shockwave.
