Canadian homeowners returned home in July 2024 to find a star-shaped gray dust pattern spotted on the walkway outside their Prince Edward Island home.
Curious about the dust, the homeowners looked at their security camera video and saw a startling moment – a rock that looked like meteorite fell from space and crash-landed on his home’s driveway, University of Alberta scientists said in a release their findings since the accident earlier this week.
University of Alberta
Footage from Ringo’s doorbell camera shows the idyllic, opulent setting framed by a security camera for about five seconds when something suddenly appears in the frame and hits what appears to be the driveway of a house on the side of a stone entrance.
The fall sounds like glass breaking or a pot falling when a meteorite hits the track. University of Alberta science professor Chris Herd said this is the first time the sound and image of a falling meteor has been documented on video.
“No other meteorite impact has been documented like this, complete with sound,” Herd said in a statement. “It adds a whole new dimension to the island’s natural history.”
Herd – who is also a university curator collection of meteorites – arrived at the scene 10 days after the possible meteorite crash to document the origin of the fragments found by the homeowners. They picked up 7 grams of rock from the grass next to the walkway and extracted more samples using a vacuum and a magnet. Herd also measured a 2 x 2 cm indentation in the track created by the impact.
University of Alberta
He discovered that the debris was indeed a meteorite and said it was an ordinary chondrite with features that helped explain why it disintegrated on impact.
Meteors can crash to Earth, but this is often a rare occurrence. In May 2023. another homeowner reported a meteorite falling on her roof in New Jersey.
Derrick Pitts, chief astronomer at the Franklin Institute, told CBS Philadelphia at the time, “For it to actually hit a house, for people to be able to pick it up, that’s really unusual and it’s happened very few times in history.”
contributed to this report.
