Tiny fireball that crashed into Georgia home is 4.56bn-year-old meteorite, say experts | Georgia

A ball of fire the size of a cherry tomato that crashed through the roof of an Atlanta metro house in June was a 20 -meter more meteorite than the earth, determined a scientist.

Friday, in a press release, the planetary geologist of the University of Georgia, Scott Harris, said that he had reached this conclusion after examining 23 grams of meteorite fragments which had been provided to him after the rock of space has pierced the house of a man and built his floor in the community of Henry de McDonough.

Harris later examined the microscopic fragments and established that they came from a meteorite which formed 4.56 billion years earlier. Experts estimate that the land has around 4.54 billion years.

“This particular meteor which has entered the atmosphere has a long history before going to McDonough’s ground,” said Harris in the press release. He explained that the space rock belonged to a group of asteroids “in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that we now think that we can attach to a much larger asteroid rupture about 470m years ago”.

According to Harris, the owner told him that he had continued to find spaces of dust of space around his lounge of asteroid strikes.

Harris said his scientific and colleagues at the Arizona State University University of Georgia intend to submit their conclusions to the Meteorological Society nomenclature committee, which oversees the name of new meteorites. Harris said that his team had proposed to appoint the subject of the McDonough meteorite.

The University of Georgia said that the meteorite studied by Harris and his colleagues was the 27 recovered in state history, which was founded in 1788. It was one of the six meteorites in this group whose fall was observed.

“This is something that expected once every few decades and not several times” in a relatively short time, as has been the case, said Harris. “Modern technology in addition to an attentive audience will help us recover more and more meteorites.”

The analysis of these space rocks is crucial to understanding the possible threat of much larger and more perilous asteroids, added Harris.

“One day, there will be an opportunity, and we never know when it will be, for something big to strike and create a catastrophic situation,” said Harris. “If we can protect ourselves, we want it.”

With regard to the case observed in McDonough, the meteorite rushed to the ground around 12:30 p.m., issuing a boom and Talita -ratio houses, officials said. Images and videos of the Ardent Fire Ball – apparently visible from the North and South Carolina – spread quickly.

The National Weather Service of the United States did not initially recognize what had happened because the fire ball looked like lightning on the world map of the agency, said an official at the time.

However, the director of local emergency management Ryan Morrison said that the officials had started to suspect a meteorite when he became clear that the fireball had struck the roof of a house and cracked through the laminate floor to the concrete.

The affected owner asked that the government will retain his identity because he has a small child, said Morrison.