A rock that crashed into a New Jersey home Monday might be a 5 billion-year-old piece of Halley’s comet.
The suspected piece of meteorite crashed through the bedroom of a New Jersey home in Hopewell Township on Monday, damaging some of the interior but avoiding any human casualties, CBS News reported. The rock made landfall at around 1 p.m. local time, and measures roughly four inches by six inches.
The Kop family, who owns the home, had a bit of a difficult time explaining the incident to the non-emergency police responders, the outlet reported. “It appears whatever came from the sky fell through the roof of the top window that’s my dad’s bedroom,” Suzy Kop told CBS.
Images of the rock circulated online after the news broke.
Meteorite hits house in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, smashing through the roof and a ceiling before hitting the floor and “bouncing around” the room pic.twitter.com/NepCP2iWbu
— BNO News (@BNONews) May 8, 2023
Kop said at first, she believed someone had thrown the rock into the house, but the force with which it landed apparently made the family think otherwise. “We are thinking it’s a meteorite, came through here, hit the floor here because that’s completely damaged, it ricocheted up to this part of the ceiling and then finally rested on the floor there,” she told the outlet.
The rock was reportedly warm to the touch when Kop picked it up, but subsequent testing assured them that it was not radioactive.
Franklin Institute chief astronomer Derrick Pitts said the rock could be anywhere from four to five billion years old, and that it could be a leftover piece of debris from the dawn of our solar system. “It’s been running around in space all that time and now it’s come to Earth and fell in their laps,” he told CBS. (RELATED: Earth Has A Blind Spot In Our Planetary Threat Detection System)
Earth is currently experiencing the Eta Aquarids meteor shower in our immediate cosmos, CBS reported. During the peak days of the shower, hundreds of shooting stars can be seen every hour, most believed to be debris from Halley’s Comet, LiveScience reported.