It’s a Treasure to Science. Too Bad It Came Through Their Roof

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By Robin George Andrews, The New York Times. 

Excerpt: At 11:17 a.m. on July 16, 2024, an asteroid hurtled across the sky above New York City. ...NASA said that the rock..., estimated to be roughly a foot long [a mass of 115 pounds], was so small that it was “incapable of surviving all the way to the ground.” During its fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere, it was thought to have been completely vaporized. The owners of a house in Hillsborough, N.J., would have begged to differ. At 11:20 a.m. ...a man working in his home office was rudely interrupted. “I heard an immense crash and felt the house shake,” he said. ...he made his way to the main bedroom. “I open the door, and I see a hole in the ceiling above my bed,” he said. The air smelled like rotten, sulfurous eggs, mingled with a fine dust. There appeared to be black soot on every horizontal and vertical surface. When the man glanced at his pillow, he saw several onyx-colored rocks. ...Most of it was annihilated as it sped through the atmosphere at 32,000 miles per hour. But a sizable fragment completed its journey to New Jersey, and the homeowners spent weeks carefully gathering roughly three pounds of extraterrestrial material. ...Now, a new study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances reveals that the space rock...contains complex organic molecules and tantalizing evidence of salty water — ingredients that life, as we know it, thrives on. Asteroids much like the Hillsborough sample may have delivered the same crucial compounds to a newly-formed Earth billions of years ago.... 

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