Experts say the small fireball that fell into the Georgia home was 4.56 billion meteorites. Georgia

Cherry tomato-sized fireball Crash One scientist determined that in June, the roof of the Atlanta metropolitan house was 20m larger than the earth.

exist Press release On Friday, Scott Harris, a planetary geologist at the University of Georgia, said he came to this conclusion after reviewing the space rock pierced a man’s home and sunken floor in the McDonald Henry County neighborhood.

Harris then looked at the debris under the microscope and determined that they were from meteorites formed 4.56 billion years ago. Experts estimate that the Earth is about 4.54 billion years old.

“The special meteors entering the atmosphere have a long history on the ground of McDonough,” Harris said in a press release. He explained that space rocks belong to a group of asteroids “in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and we now think we can break up with a larger asteroid about 470 million years ago.”

According to Harris, the homeowner reported to him that he continued to find space dust around his living room during an asteroid strike.

Harris says he is his fellow Georgia Arizona State University scientists and colleagues intend to submit their findings to the Meteorological Society’s naming committee, which oversees the new meteorite naming. Harris said his team has proposed to name its theme McDonough Meteorite.

The University of Georgia says Harris and his colleagues are the 27th-ranked meteorites in the state’s history, founded in 1788. This is one of six meteorites in that group witnessed.

“This is expected every few decades, not multiple times,” Harris said. “In addition to the attentive public, modern technology will help us recover more and more meteorites.”

Harris added that analyzing this space rock is crucial to understanding the possible threats of larger and more dangerous asteroids.

“There will be a chance one day, and we never know when it will be a big attack and cause a catastrophic situation,” Harris said. “If we can prevent that, we want to.”

In the case at McDonough, the meteorite hit the ground around 12:30 p.m., emitting Atlanta’s boom and rattling houses, officials said. image and video Fireballs seen from North Carolina and South Carolina are reported to be spreading rapidly.

An official said at the time that the National Weather Service was not initially aware of what was going on because the fireball resembles the agency’s global lightning mapper.

However, local emergency management director Ryan Morrison said officials began to suspect a meteorite because it was obvious that the fireball had already crossed the roof of the house and cracked through the laminate floor to the concrete.

Morrison said the affected homeowners asked the government to withhold their identities because they had a small child.