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A meteorite that lit up the skies above New York City before crash-landing through someone’s roof contains evidence of how life was originally brought to Earth from alien worlds.
The space rock produced a sonic boom when it passed just south of the Statue of Liberty on July 16, 2024, before fragments began falling to Earth.
One meteorite weighing more than a kilogram later struck a home in Hillsborough, New Jersey, according to researchers writing in the journal Science Advances.
‘A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a small primitive asteroid where it experienced concentrated salty fluids – a process not previously known from this type of proto planet world,’ said lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
Scientists say the object, which was about the size of a large airline suitcase, entered Earth’s atmosphere at around 32,000mph (14.4km/s).
Around 60 people across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania reported seeing the meteor to the American Meteor Society, while 16 people in New York and New Jersey said they felt the resulting shockwave.
‘Our cameras in Northford, Connecticut, and Douglassville, Pennsylvania, as well as a doorbell camera in Wayne, New Jersey, captured the meteor, and from that we measured its trajectory,’ said American Meteor Society operations manager Mike Hankey. ‘The path traced back to low in the asteroid belt.’
The rock broke apart rapidly as it descended and was no longer visible at an altitude of about 22 miles (35km).
After the meteor disappeared, Doppler weather radar at Newark Airport briefly detected a long cloud of falling fragments stretching from Staten Island into New Jersey. Hillsborough lay at the far end of that debris trail, where the largest pieces are believed to have landed.
Only one meteorite was recovered after it smashed through the roof of a house. The homeowner described discovering extensive damage inside the property.
“I was at home at the time, heard a loud crash and found a hole in the ceiling of the master bedroom,” they said. “I smelled a strong sulfur-like odor and saw many black fragments along with debris and black dust that covered my bed, carpet and surrounding areas.”
The owner immediately documented the scene and carefully preserved the fragments using disposable gloves, aluminium foil and glass jars, helping to minimise contamination.
Laboratory analysis identified the meteorite as belonging to the rare CM group of carbonaceous chondrites, a class of primitive meteorites rich in carbon and water-bearing minerals.
Co-author Mike Zolensky, a meteoriticist at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center, said the Hillsborough sample showed greater alteration by water than is normally seen in CM2 meteorites.
The Hillsborough meteorite is only the 22nd observed fall of a CM-type meteorite and just the second witnessed fall of a CM1/2 specimen, after the Kolang meteorite in Indonesia in 2020. No witnessed CM1 falls have ever been recorded.
‘Thanks to the homeowner’s quick reaction, these are the most pristine CM1/2 meteorites we know of,’ said Jenniskens.
Scientists also identified small, salt-rich fragments that appear to have originated close to the surface of the meteorite’s parent asteroid, where liquid water is thought to have evaporated and concentrated dissolved salts.
Researchers are now working to identify the minerals within those salts and compare them with samples returned from the asteroids Ryugu and Bennu by the Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx space missions.
Scientists believe highly concentrated salty water, or brine, may have played an important role in the chemistry that preceded the emergence of life on Earth.
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‘Isotope studies of carbon and nitrogen suggest that primitive carbonaceous chondrites, including CM-types, delivered organic matter to the early Earth,’ said cosmochemist Queenie Chan of Royal Holloway, University of London, and biogeochemist Nana Ogawa of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.
‘The Hillsborough meteorite contained 1.8% by weight of carbon and 0.07% of nitrogen, and had carbon and nitrogen isotopes typical for CM-type meteorites.’
The team found a broad range of soluble organic compounds, indicating that the meteorite had undergone more extensive water-related alteration than most other CM meteorites.
‘A high fraction of compounds were the product of organic chemistry with minerals,’ said organic mass spectrometry specialist Phil Schmitt-Kopplin of the Technical University of Munich.
‘We do not know if these magnesium organic compounds were contributed by brine chemistry or were simply left over from earlier impact shock processes.’
Researchers also detected numerous amino acids, alongside carboxylic acids and other organic molecules.
Astrobiologist Danny Glavin of Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center and colleagues concluded that meteorites of this type may have delivered important organic compounds to the early Earth, contributing to the inventory of molecules from which life eventually emerged. Their findings suggest the complex mixture of amino acids found in the Hillsborough meteorite most likely formed within its parent asteroid, with brine chemistry playing a significant role.
Some fragments of the Hillsborough meteorite will be preserved at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
‘We are thrilled that nature delivered such a precious asteroid sample on our doorstep,’ said curator Denton Ebel.
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