A huge explosion shook a woman awake to find a “fist-size” hole in the ceiling and a chunk of space rock on her pillow.
Ruth Hamilton had been sleeping for hours in Golden, British Columbia, when something came crashing through her home on Oct. 3, CBC News reported.
“I was shaking and scared when it happened,” Hamilton told Castlegar News. “I thought someone had jumped in or it was a gun or something. It’s almost a relief when we realized it could only have fallen out of the sky.”
A black chunk of rock landed inches from where she was resting her head, according to CTV News. A meteorite the “size of a melon” was lying under her pillow,” CBC News reported.
Hamilton’s face was covered in debris, but she was otherwise unharmed, according to CTV.
The woman called the police to investigate since she wasn’t sure what to do. Originally the group thought the rock could’ve come from ongoing construction nearby.
“We called the Canyon project to see if they were doing any blasting and they weren’t, but they did say they had seen a bright light in the sky that had exploded and caused some booms,” Hamilton told Castlegar News.
After ruling that out, police thought the rock was a meteorite.
Meteorites are chunks of space rock that survive the trip through Earth’s atmosphere.
“Most space rocks smaller than a football field will break apart in Earth’s atmosphere,” NASA said on its website. “Traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour, the object disintegrates as pressure exceeds the strength of the object, resulting a bright flare.”
Less than 5% of meteorites ever make it to the surface, and they’re usually the size of a pebble or fist, according to NASA. About 50,000 meteorites have ever been found on Earth.
Hamilton told CBC News she plans to send the meteorite to experts at Western University in Ontario to identify within a month.
___
© 2021 The Charlotte Observer
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
