Meteorite that crashed into Georgia living room is older than Earth: Scientists

ATLANTA (WJW) — A meteorite that crash-landed into a Georgia home earlier this summer turns out to be millions of years older than Earth itself, according to researchers at the University of Georgia.

NASA confirmed that many people in the southeastern U.S. reported seeing the fireball flying across the sky in broad daylight on June 26.

It was first seen above Oxford, Georgia, before disintegrating 27 miles above West Forest, Georgia, “unleashing an energy of about 20 tons of TNT,” NASA said.

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Doppler radar at the time detected meteorites falling to the ground in the area and, according to the University of Georgia, fragments ripped through a McDonough resident’s roof into his living room.

The space rock left a dent in the floor and sounded like a gunshot upon impact, UGA wrote in a press release over the weekend.

“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,” UGA department of geology researcher Scott Harris said in the release. “There was enough energy when it hit the floor that it pulverized part of the material down to literal dust fragments.”

Twenty-three pieces of the space rock, named McDonough Meteorite, were handed over to Harris, who determined that the pieces were incredibly old.

Harris said in the release that he believes the meteorite is a low metal ordinary chondrite, meaning it formed roughly 4.56 billion years ago.

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According to The Planetary Society, Earth is believed to be about 4.54 billion years old.

“It belongs to a group of asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that we now think we can tie to a breakup of a much larger asteroid about 470 million years ago,” Harris continued. “But in that breakup, some pieces get into Earth-crossing orbits, 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.”

According to the university, Harris is now working alongside researchers at Arizona State University to send the findings with the meteor’s name to the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society.

Space enthusiasts hoping to see the spectacle for themselves are in luck. Another meteorite from the fireball is on display at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, Georgia, officials announced on Facebook last month.

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