Possible meteorite crashes through the roof of a New Jersey home, lands in bedroom still warm
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The likely space rock was about the size of a grapefruit. It could have come from the Eta Aquarids meteor shower, local police said.
Nobody was injured in the rare incident.
"I did touch the thing because I just thought it was a random rock, I don't know, and it was warm," she said.
After a local fire department's hazmat team confirmed that the object was not hazardous, police say they contacted an astrophysicist at the College of New Jersey for further examination.
"I have seen quite a few interesting and strange happenings in my career, but I would never have thought a meteorite would be one of them," James Rosso, Chief of the Hopewell Township Police Department, told Insider in an email.
Shooting stars — the streaks of bright light that flash across the sky during meteor showers — come from small space rocks entering our atmosphere at high speeds, heating to extreme temperatures from the friction between the rock's surface and our planet's air particles, and burning up.
Not all meteors burn up all the way, though. Sometimes a chunk survives the fall and hits the ground. That's called a meteorite.
It's rare for these falling space rocks to hit buildings or people.
"It's been running around in space all that time and now it's come to Earth and it fell right into their laps," Derrick Pitts, the chief astronomer at the Franklin Institute, told CBS News Philadelphia. "For it to actually strike a house, for people to be able to pick up, that's really unusual and has happened very few times in history."
He added that this falling object could be as old as the solar system: 4 to 5 billion years old.
According to CBS, the family was considering buying a lottery ticket, since they just won the space lottery.
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