A strange rock crashed through the roof of a New Jersey house, and scientists have now confirmed it’s a meteorite
No one was home when the blackish hunk of rock slammed into the house in Hopewell Township.
Suzy Kop was surprised to find a grapefruit-size rock on the floor of a bedroom in her father’s New Jersey house on Monday, and she grew even more baffled upon picking it up.
That’s because it was warm.
Then, upon looking around the room to see where the rock might’ve come from, Kop got yet another surprise.
“I’m looking up on the ceiling, and there’s these two holes,” she told 6abc. “I’m like, `What in the world has happened here?’ ”
On Thursday, scientists at the College of New Jersey said the blackish hunk was not of this world at all. It was a meteorite, likely fallen from the belt of asteroids that lies between Jupiter and Mars, according to Shannon Graham, an assistant professor of physics.
Why two holes in the ceiling? The rock apparently fell from the sky at such great speed that it tore through the roof of the house in Hopewell Township, Mercer County, then bounced off the hardwood floor and hit the ceiling before landing on the floor again, the physicist said.
No one was home at the time of Monday’s impact, estimated at 12:14 p.m. based on several reports of “flight streaks” and loud noises at about the same time. Kop, the homeowner’s daughter, happened to stop by the house not long after, and found the rock at 12:35 p.m.
Graham, the physicist, heard about the specimen that afternoon from Hopewell police, whom Kop called for guidance.
“I can tell you that would not have been on my top 100 guesses as to why I would be getting a phone call on Monday,” the scientist said in a phone interview.
A rare find
Kop brought the specimen to the school’s campus in Ewing Township on Wednesday. Graham helped analyze it with two other scientists, physics department chair Nathan Magee and Jerry Delaney, a retired meteorite expert from Rutgers University.
Using a scanning electron microscope, they identified the rock as a type of meteorite called a stony chondrite, based partly on the presence of telltale grains called chondrules. It measures 4-by-6 inches and weighs 984 grams, a shade over 2 pounds.
The team plans to conduct additional analysis of the rock’s chemical makeup, Graham said. That could include tests to pinpoint the specimen’s age. But given its apparent origin from the asteroid belt, the rock is likely more than 4.5 billion years old, Graham said.
“It’s basically leftover debris from the formation of the solar system,” she said, “so it’s pretty cool.”
Time for a brief vocabulary lesson, courtesy of NASA. Asteroids are large chunks of rock in space. A meteoroid is a small piece that has broken off of an asteroid. If it enters Earth’s atmosphere, it is then called a meteor. And if the object survives its high-speed, fiery journey through the atmosphere to reach Earth’s surface, it is called a meteorite.
The New Jersey specimen appears to belong to a class of chondrites that contain very low levels of iron, of which just 1,100 have ever been found, Graham said.
For now, the rock is back in the hands of Kop and her sister, Christine Lloyd.
Asked what the family planned to do with it, Lloyd declined to comment.