Alien rock causes cosmic disturbance in New Jersey home Residents of a home in New Jersey have been left shaken after a possible meteorite crashed through the roof, ricocheted off a hardwood floor, and dented the ceiling before coming to a rest. Thankfully, no one was injured in the freak incident at a house on Old Washington Crossing Pennington Road, Hopewell Township, on Monday …
Alarmed by this, I immediately dashed out and put sandbags around the nearest canon. However it didn’t go well because a) he’s a respectable member of the clergy and hasn’t exploded in living memory, and b) he was trying to conduct a service at the time. Embarrassing. Who knew vergers are allowed to carry tasers?
The album you took your handle from just turned 50 last month. Many of ElReg's commentads were already adults when it was released.
A little over a year ago, I was looking at the album cover for The Stooges Funhouse (autographed by Iggy and framed, on a friend's wall behind UV resistant glass) and realized it had been well over half a century since I first heard it.
The tunage of my misspent youth is now considered art ... I nearly had to sit down.
Wait ... that space rock is HOW old? Never mind ...
Meteorites don't avoid dropping on houses, there are just so few houses.
And it has happened before and also in the USA. And well the whole planet is made of space debries. And we are stardust as they say.
Meteorits are mainly collected on ice like in Antarctica where they are more easily spotted on the ice.
That one very much looks like an iron meteorite.
Many, many El Reg readers have no association with, or long since terminated any association with facebook.
I would add IG and TT and Twiterverse, but hey, that's where the shiny attention getting things are... I'm sure there are more. I'm old, and either I don't care, or my memory is going...
I'm more interested in the Bowie and Fogerty comments, and didn't someone quote the band America with the stardust bit?
Having a space rock of this size land on your house is thankfully rare (in case you are in the UK and were wondering what the proper procedure is for dealing with a meteorite, historical guidance from Middlesbrough is that it should be kept in the Railway Lost Property Office:
https://www.yorkshiremuseum.org.uk/collections/collections-highlights/the-middlesbrough-meteorite/ ).
But the referenced article from the PSI is simply ignoring the massive number of meteorites that reach the surface of Earth all the time - just because they are too tiny to actually crash through your roof shouldn't mean they are just forgotten about! Micrometeorites can be found pretty much everywhere and all you need to do is clean out a few gutters:
https://www.newscientist.com/letter/mg23331090-800-10-finding-meteorites-in-your-gutters-is-easy/
Not surprising at all. Certain classes of meteorites (of which this was one) are known to have originated at specific times in the past. All you need is a photo, or a description supplied by an expert, to take more than a reasonable guess at the age.
If anything, I'd be very surprised if the expert was wrong.
What a wonderful opportunity to share with the local schools. Assuming it's not radioactive, have the kids take its mass, volume, hold a magnet next to it, talk about where it came from, what it's made of, how old it may be, etc... so many great ways to get kids into STEM with such a rare event.
And then of course, when they get older, they'll join the Reg masses and keep the cycle going.
> Assuming it's not radioactive
Very few meteorites are. This one sounds like a standard ferrous meteorite, also called "siderites", which are mostly blobs of iron-nickel alloy. They look quite nice too...
Those people can consider themselves lucky their projectile was not that size (60 tons)!...
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