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A meteorite fragment that burst through the roof of a Georgia home last June has been determined to be billions of years old and to predate the Earth, according to a geology professor.
"A lot of people saw the fireball," University of Georgia geologist Scott Harris told Fox News Digital of the meteorite fragment that he said had come from an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and fell to Earth on June 26 near Atlanta.
He said he was immediately alerted to the incident and went to examine what had happened, looking in the attic for the fragment's point of entry.
"The homeowner didn't know that they actually had a clean hole through the roof, through an air duct," he continued. "They knew about the hole in the roof, but they didn't know it went through the air duct, through one side of the air duct, out the other side of air duct through a couple of feet of insulation, then through the ceiling, then they had about a 10-foot-high ceiling, kind of a slanted frame ceiling, and then it went the distance from there to the floor and left about a centimeter-and-a-half little crater in the floor."
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He said the meteorite had left a hole in the floor "about the size of a large cherry tomato."
"And so this hit hard enough that part of it just absolutely was pulverized like somebody hitting it with a sledgehammer," he explained.
Harris said the ancient fragment briefly broke the sound barrier when it entered the Earth's atmosphere.
"These are objects that go back to the original material formed 4.56 billion years ago," Harris explained. "So, in the days slightly before the formation of the planets themselves, and at least the rocky interior planets. And, you know, those are the basic building blocks then of our rocky planets and, so that's one of the reasons that scientists are interested in studying them is it shows us about some of the processes that were active during the early days of the solar system."
The Earth is believed to be 4.54 billion years old.
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Harris explained that while such a small fragment didn't present a threat to anyone, scientists want to study the dynamics of meteorites falling to Earth because the "ultimate goal is to tell you what the risk assessment is for what could be absolute doom."
"No one's got to do anything about a small object like this coming through the atmosphere, but understanding where these materials come from in the solar system and understanding that even the dynamics of the small pieces are important for ultimately understanding where the bigger ones are and what the risks are for us in the future," he said.
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Scientists studying the dynamics of meteorites can attempt to "engineer ways to avoid collisions with them, most notably by techniques like were demonstrated a few years ago by the DART mission, where we could actually have what's called a kinetic impacter to go and basically move an asteroid a little bit," Harris explained.
"If you move an asteroids headed toward us, and you move it early enough, then you get it to avoid us all together."
