A metallic object hit a New Jersey home this week and officials think it may be a meteorite.
The object hit a home around 1:15 p.m. Monday in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, about 15 miles northwest of Trenton, according to the Hopewell Township Police Department.
Police said the four by six inch oblong-shaped object went through the roof and ceiling before hitting the hardwood floor and stopping.
Derrick Pitts, Chief Astronomer at the Philadelphia-based Franklin Institute Science Museum, said objects fall into the Earth’s atmosphere all the time, so this isn’t a rare occurrence.
What is rare is items hitting someone’s home.
“Here’s an instance where a sizable object has not only fallen in a populated region, it also hit a house and it was immediately collected by the occupants,” he said. “The instance of that happening, you can count on one hand over the last 1,000 years, maybe.”
That’s only if this is really a meteorite though, he said. That’ll come with more in-depth analysis, he said.
“If you look at it, it does resemble what certain kinds of meteorites look like,” he said. “It stands as a strong possibility that that’s what this could be.”
Eta Aquariid:Meteor shower peaks tonight: How to watch Eta Aquariid in the night sky
Meteor showers:The Eta Aquariid meteor showers: A visual guide on where, when and how to view
What is this object?
Pitts said the item could very well be a meteorite.
Objects that fly around in space are called meteoroids, he said. If they fall into earth’s atmosphere, they’re called meteors and if they land, they’re called meteorites.
So in this case, the object that hit the house would be a meteorite.
He also said it’s likely extremely old, as in 4 billion or 5 billion years old.
“Pieces of space junk flying around, these things tend to be in the billions of years old,” he said. “That’s because this is trash leftover from the beginning of the solar system. This is junk that didn’t get swept up into planets. A lot of this is dust and dirt and little bits of rock and some larger pieces of rock and asteroids.”
These objects fly around the solar system until they get caught in the gravitational field of a planet or another body, he said.
The objects then get pulled down to that planet or body.
Where did the (potential) meteorite come from?
The police department investigating the incident said it reached out to multiple agencies to learn more about the object.
The Eta Aquariid meteor shower happens every year between mid-April and the end of May, according to the American Meteor Society. The fireballs can be seen once Earth runs into a dense stream of debris from the Comet Halley. The debris dates back to over 3,000 years ago.
But Pitts said it’s unlikely that the object was related to the Eta Aquariids.
“My own personal belief is that this is just a happy coincidence,” he said. “I don’t think it’s part of the Aquariid shower. It just happens that the peak of the Aquariid shower was two days before this object was reported. People tend to draw conclusions like that.”
Until more research is done, Pitts is referring to the New Jersey object as a “very tiny asteroid.”
“It’s much more intriguing and exciting for it to be extraterrestrial than … the kid next door throwing something through the neighbor’s roof,” he said.
