How a meteorite fell from the sky and landed at the University of Georgia.
It came from outer space and crash-landed in a Georgia living room.
June 26 started out as a pretty normal, work-from-home day for a McDonough man. Then, while on a Zoom call, he heard a boom and felt a vibration equivalent to a close-range gunshot.
A meteorite blasted through his roof and HVAC duct and embedded itself into the floor. But the man didn’t lose his cool. Instead of panicking over the golf ball-sized dent the space rock made, he grabbed his phone and called Scott Harris.
“I suspect that he heard three simultaneous things. One was the collision with his roof, one was a tiny cone of a sonic boom, and a third was it impacting the floor all in the same moment,” says Harris, a visiting scholar in the University of Georgia Franklin College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Geology. “There was enough energy when it hit the floor that it pulverized part of the material down to literal dust fragments.”
The homeowner, who prefers not to be identified, found himself with a living room full of space dust to vacuum. But he provided fragments to Harris so the researcher could determine the meteorite’s origin and classification.
Turns out, it has quite the past.
It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s…
Before the McDonough Meteorite landed in Henry County, it streaked across the daytime sky as a fireball (otherwise known as a bolide).
Researchers clocked the meteorite entering the atmosphere at cosmic velocity. Before it split apart, the meteorite was the size of a vending machine hurtling toward McDonough faster than the speed of sound.
The remaining fragments are only about the size of a cherry tomato. But those fragments shot toward Earth at 1 kilometer per second. (That’s about 10 Dooley Fields each second.)
It was serendipitous that the homeowner was something of a scientist himself. He was more than happy to send all 23 grams to UGA for analysis.
Harris was out of town when he got the call to study the remains. He hightailed it back to Georgia.
“I was really interested in being able to examine that piece but also the dynamics of how it went through that house,” he says. “I couldn’t wait to get back.”
Out of This World History
The meteorite hails from a group of asteroids that make up a belt between Mars and Jupiter. That group broke from a much larger asteroid about 470 million years ago.
So how did the McDonough Meteorite end up all the way down here?
“In that breakup, some pieces get stuck in Earth’s orbit, and if given long enough, their orbit around the sun and Earth’s orbit around the sun end up being at the same place, at the same moment in time,” Harris says.
Using optical and electron microscopes to analyze the fragments, Harris says he believes the meteorite to be a low metal (L) ordinary chondrite, a specific combination of oxygen, drops of liquid, and minerals.
This classification puts the meteorite’s formation at 4.56 billion years ago. That makes it about 10 million years older than the Earth.
In addition to finalizing its lineage, UGA will submit findings, along with the name McDonough Meteorite (meteorites get their namesake from the ZIP code they were found in), to the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society. The official documentation will be published in the Meteoritical Bulletin.
Just like the space rock itself, news of the discovery has exploded worldwide, appearing in The New York Times, on the BBC, and on CBS News, to name a few outlets.
Part of the Family
UGA has been the premier destination for intergalactic rocks for many years thanks to its expert group of researchers.
In a box of previously named and identified meteorites, mysterious rocks, and unique formations, the McDonough Meteorite joins a long, extensive line of recovered cosmic wonders housed in the Department of Geology.
“UGA geologists also study moon rocks and meteorites from Mars, as well as satellite data that show what’s on other planets and asteroids,” says geology professor Paul A. Schroeder. “To make sense of those satellite images, it’s important to compare them with real samples we can hold in our hands. This kind of research doesn’t just answer big questions about the origins of Earth and life. It also helps prepare us for the future.”
The McDonough Meteorite will be stored at UGA for analysis and comparison to other samples. Additional pieces that fell in the area on June 26 will be displayed publicly at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville.
And as for the next crash landing? Keep one eye on the sky.
“I always joke that we need a stand selling steel umbrellas just in case,” Schroeder says. “Fortunately, these events are relatively uncommon, but we never know when something large is going to hit and create a catastrophic situation. So if we can guard against that, we want to.”