Astro Blog

2026-07-18. A drop-in visitor carried clues about life’s origins . By ScienceAdvisor. Excerpt: On 16 July 2024, a homeowner in northern New Jersey heard a loud crash in his upstairs bedroom. When he went to investigate, he found the room covered in black dust and rock fragments, and a sulfurlike odor hung in the air. There was also a foot-wide hole in the roof. Earlier in the day, 60 observers across the northeast United States had witnessed a 117-pound meteor streaking across the sky and breaking down into small chunks, including the one that broke into the New Jersey bedroom and burst into pieces. The homeowner...quickly sealed the evidence in glass jars...2 pounds of the meteorite’s fragments... preserved in unusually pristine condition.... On the two-year anniversary of the impact, a team of researchers revealed that the meteorite contained many organic chemicals, including amino acids, thought to be key ingredients for the emergence of life on Earth . The scientists also found hi...

By Amanda Holpuch , The New York Times.  Excerpt: A couple in Canada were returning home from walking their dogs some months ago when they found a burst of dusty debris on their walkway. They turned to their security-camera footage for answers and found it showed a mysterious puff of smoke appearing on the tidy walkway where the mystery splotch was. The source of the splotch was officially registered  on Monday  as the Charlottetown meteorite, named after the city on Prince Edward Island, in eastern Canada, where it landed....  Full article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/science/meteorite-debris-security-camera-canada.html . [includes video of the camera] 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/16/meteorite-that-landed-in-cotswolds-may-solve-mystery-of-earths-water By  Hannah Devlin , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Water covers three-quarters of the Earth’s surface and was crucial for the emergence of life, but its origins have remained a subject of active debate among scientists. Now, a 4.6bn-year-old rock that crashed on to a  driveway in Gloucestershire last year  has provided some of the most compelling evidence to date that water arrived on Earth from asteroids in the outer solar system.... 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/us/meteor-explosion-pittsburgh.html By  Azi Paybarah , The New York Times.  Excerpt: For Heather Lin Ishler, the first morning of 2022 in Dormont, a neighborhood just south of downtown Pittsburgh, began like most days had in 2021. ...Then, the bed shook. “The sensation,” Ms. Ishler, 34, later said, “reminded me of fireworks” and how, if you stand too close, you can feel “a rumbling in your chest.” ...“It was just the feeling of the shock wave,” Ms. Ishler recalled, “but no sound or flash or anything like that.” ...Diane Turnshek, an astronomer who lectures at Carnegie Mellon University, felt something powerful on Saturday morning, too. She was in her home atop a Pittsburgh hill, 1,120 feet above sea level. Her initial thought was that her dryer had fallen off the washing machine in the room next door. Calls started coming into the Pittsburgh office of the National Weather Service from people who had heard “a really loud sound but didn’t see a...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/world/canada/meteorite-bed.html By  John Yoon  and  Vjosa Isai , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Ruth Hamilton was fast asleep in her home in British Columbia when she awoke to the sound of her dog barking, followed by “an explosion.” She jumped up and turned on the light, only to see a hole in the ceiling. Her clock said 11:35 p.m. ...“Oh, my gosh,” she recalled telling the operator, “there’s a rock in my bed.” A meteorite, she later learned. The 2.8-pound rock the size of a large man’s fist had barely missed Ms. Hamilton’s head, leaving “drywall debris all over my face,” she said. Her close encounter on the night of Oct. 3 left her rattled, but it  captivated the internet  and handed scientists an unusual chance to study a space rock that had crashed to Earth.…

https://eos.org/articles/apollo-may-have-found-an-earth-meteorite-on-the-moon Source:   By Kimberly M. S. Cartier, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: The meteorite may have been blasted off of Earth during an impact, mixed with lunar rocks, and brought back to Earth 4 billion years later by astronauts. A rock sample brought back by Apollo 14 may contain the first evidence of Earth material on the Moon. New analysis of zircon grains in one lunar sample suggests that the zircon formed under conditions typical in Earth’s crust and not on the Moon. ...“I expect there could be a bit of controversy because this is the first of its kind,” [Jeremy] Bellucci said. “Hopefully,” he said, “it inspires a search for more Earth materials and further analyses on these samples.”...

Source:   By Kenneth Chang, The New York Times Excerpt: ...one might think that meteorites that fall on Earth ought to be just like the asteroids that pass through Earth’s neighborhood. “That’s what everybody would have expected,” said Philipp R. Heck, the curator in charge for the meteorite and physical geology collections at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Planetary scientists were surprised almost a decade ago when they discovered that the most plentiful types of meteorites they had collected and studied on Earth were actually not common in space. In a paper published Monday by the journal Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers led by Dr. Heck says it has uncovered part of the explanation. Mineralogical evidence in some meteorites had already pointed to a cataclysmic collision in the asteroid belt about 466 million years ago — long before dinosaurs, when multicellular animals were still fairly new. (Dr. Heck estimated that any skywatchers back...

Source:   By Paul Voosen, Science Excerpt: Some 3.8 billion years ago... A 930-kilometer-wide impact basin perched on the moon’s visible edge, [Mare] Orientale resembles a bull’s-eye, with a smooth interior encircled by three rough rings. ...Do any of the rings match the original crater rim left by the striking asteroid or comet? Now, a new subsurface moon map from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, published today in Science, suggests that the answer is no. ...GRAIL’s two spacecraft...measured Orientale from a scant altitude of 2 kilometers. At such close range, the spacecraft were exceptionally sensitive to tiny changes in the moon’s gravity caused by buried rocks of different density–giving the GRAIL team a picture of the subsurface, and a better idea of how the impact actually went down. They found that the Orientale strike hollowed out a crater some 320 to 460 kilometers wide—smaller than any of the rings. Within an hour, the crater’s steep wa...

Source:   NASA Excerpt: There are many types of small bodies in the solar system, but none may be as dramatic as comets.  …Comets also have a big influence when they collide with Earth. …Some scientists argue that colliding comets early in Earth's development contributed much of Earth's water. Some scientists also postulate that comets could have delivered organic molecules critical to the formation of life.... solarsystem.nasa.gov/yss/display.cfm