On a clear June day in Georgia, a blazing fireball suddenly fell out of the sky over the Atlanta metro area. The source of this spectacle was a 1-ton meteor that exploded in mid-air, sending a cherry tomato-sized fragment shooting through the roof of a McDonough home.
Though no one knew it then, this space rock hailed from a time long before Earth had even formed. Using optical and electron microscopes, geologists at the University of Georgia analyzed 0.8 ounces (23 grams) of fragments recovered from the piece that ripped through the house on June 26. Their study revealed that this meteor was likely over 4.56 billion years old. That’s 20 million years older than our planet.
“This particular meteor that entered the atmosphere has a long history before it made it to the ground of McDonough, and in order to totally understand that, we actually have to examine what the rock is and determine what group of asteroids it belongs to,” Scott Harris, a University of Georgia geology researcher, said in a release.
Harris and his colleagues extrapolated the meteor’s age by classifying the recovered fragments. The composition of the debris indicated it came from a low-metal ordinary chondrite, a group of asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. Experts believe they stem from a breakup of a much larger asteroid that occurred about 470 million years ago, Harris explained. As these meteors orbit the Sun, they occasionally cross through Earth’s orbit, he said.
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