A meteorite that blazed across the sky and punched a hole in a Georgia home's roof is older than Earth itself. According to a scientist who examined fragments of the space rock, it formed 4.56 billion years ago—roughly 20 million years before our planet. On June 26, people across several Southern states reported seeing the mysterious fireball in broad daylight as it hurtled toward the ground at a supersonic speed.
University of Georgia planetary geologist Scott Harris examined 23 grams of fragments from a piece of the meteorite that was the size of a cherry tomato. The piece struck a man's roof "like a bullet," leaving a dent in the floor of his home outside Atlanta.
"It belongs to a group of asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter," Harris said, "that we now think we can tie to a breakup of a much larger asteroid about 470 million years ago."
Harris and his colleagues at Arizona State University plan to submit their findings to the Nomenclature Committee of the Meteoritical Society. They have proposed naming it the McDonough Meteorite, after the Georgia city where it landed.
Fast-moving comet approaching Earth
The Hubble Space Telescope has taken its clearest picture yet of a fast-moving comet that came from another star system and is visiting our solar system. On Thursday, NASA and the European Space Agency shared these new images. This comet, known as 3I/Atlas, was discovered last month by a telescope in Chile. It's only the third object from outside our solar system that we've seen pass by, and it doesn't pose any danger to Earth.
At first, astronomers thought the comet's icy core was quite large, possibly tens of kilometers wide. But Hubble's new images have helped them narrow that down to a maximum of about 5.6 kilometers. It might even be much smaller—around 320 meters, which is roughly the length of 1,000 feet!
ALSO READ: Trump budget seeks to shut down NASA missions measuring carbon dioxide, crop health
