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A woman who claimed to have been hit by a meteorite earlier this month may have been hit by an ordinary Earth rock, experts say.
The unnamed victim was enjoying a cup of coffee with a friend on the terrace of her home in Schirmeck, northeastern France, when she “felt a jolt in the ribs.”
It followed a bang on the roof above her, leading to the assumption that a space rock may have crashed into it before falling off and hitting the woman.
At first she thought it was an animal or a bat, before seeing a golf ball-sized rock that looked like “a piece of cement” from a roof tile.
She ruled that out on the basis that the color didn’t match and instead took it to local geologist Dr. Thierry Rebmann for identification.
Disputed claim: A woman who said she was hit by a meteorite earlier this month may have been hit by an ordinary Earth rock, experts claim (file photo)
He said it contained a mixture of iron and silicon, which is typical of meteorites.
“It does not correspond to a volcanic rock from the Val de Bruche sector. Given this lady’s testimony, it is likely that we are dealing with a meteorite, especially since the rock has been heated to a very high degree,” added Dr. Rebmann to it.
But several experts have disputed this claim.
Astronomer Jeremie Vaubaillon of the Observatoire de Paris said photos of it, shared with a local newspaper, “clearly show that this is not a meteorite.”
He told MailOnline it had “too many angles” to come from space, adding that meteorites “don’t have pointy, irregular peaks because the rock melts as it enters the atmosphere because of the surrounding super-hot plasma.”
Vaubaillon described this reaction as the melting of an ice cube, with angular pieces quickly disappearing.
The rock also has a “bubbling” and irregular surface — features similar to volcanic rock, where lava bubbles are frozen as the molten material cools rapidly.
Not only does the specimen contain many holes and bubbles, but it also lacks the smooth surfaces that meteorites often have due to the heat they experience.
Not only that, but there is no thin black film or “fusion crust” that is common with space rocks.
Vaubaillon, like other experts, is baffled as to where the rock might have come from.
Some say it probably fell off a roof or was thrown off the road, perhaps by burglars checking to see if anyone was home.
Not only does the specimen contain many holes and bubbles, but it also lacks the smooth surfaces that meteorites often have due to the heat they experience. Not only that, but there is no thin black film or “fusion crust” that is common with space rocks. This is a typical meteorite
Geologist Barbara Gollain of the Strasbourg Mineralogical Museum said it looked more like a steel mill slag than a space rock.
Slag is a by-product of smelting ore and used metal and can contain iron and silicone, such as meteorites. It is used in construction, cement and road construction.
That would support the theory that the rock either came from the roof or the road, but certainly not from outer space.
Dr. Richard Greenwood, a Research Fellow at the Open University’s planetary and space sciences, told MailOnline it could even be a small rock that fell off the wheels of an airplane.
The final stumbling block to the theory that the rock came from space is that it did not damage the roof on the morning it supposedly impacted.
According to François Colas, an astronomer with the Fireball Recovery and InterPlanetary Observation Network (FRIPON) air surveillance network, a meteorite falling from the sky tends to crash into the surface at speeds of 300 km/h.
That would have done quite a bit of damage to the roof.
The woman claimed she was hit by a meteorite while enjoying a cup of coffee with a friend in Schirmeck, northeastern France
The only person ever killed by a space rock was a man in modern-day Iraq in 1888. Pictured is this meteorite’s likely trajectory
FRIPON also monitors the skies over France for flares caused by meteors and none were observed in the area on July 6, the day the incident occurred.
Such an object reaches magnitude -15 [with the minus prefix indicating a particularly bright object over Earth]; it does not go unnoticed. In this season there are also many amateur astronomers observing; they would have reported such an event,” Colas said French astronomy publication Ciel & Espace.
The woman and her boyfriend were sitting on her patio when the recent incident happened around 4am on July 6, she told local newspaper Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace.
“I heard a big ‘poem’ coming from the roof next to us,” she said.
“In the second that followed, I felt a shock on the ribs. I thought it was an animal, a bat.
“We thought it was a piece of cement, the one we put on the ridge tiles, but it wasn’t the color.”
It’s unclear where the rock is now, but Dr. Rebmann previously suggested that scientists should study it further to confirm its exact origin.
According to NASA, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons of dust and sand-sized particles every day, but most of them burn up before reaching the Earth’s surface.
Golf ball-sized meteorites hit Earth every few years, but the frequency with which they hit populated areas is even smaller.
This is especially true because our planet’s surface is about 71 percent ocean.
The rocks are usually easier to see when landing in a desert, as they contrast with the stark landscape and are less likely to be covered in dirt or vegetation.
“It’s very rare to find them in our temperate environments,” said Dr Rebmann.
‘They merge with other elements. On the other hand, we can find them more easily in a desert environment.’
It’s not the first time someone has been hit by a space rock.
The only known person to be hit by a space rock was Alabama woman Ann Hodges, who was struck by a grapefruit-sized meteorite in November 1954.
It crashed through the roof of her house as she slept and hit her upper leg and hand, but she survived the ordeal, suffering only bruises.
According to a 2020 study, the only recorded instance of meteorite killing a human goes back more than 130 years.
At the time, the study’s authors found evidence of a meteorite that killed one man and left another paralyzed after it fell “like rain” on the Iraqi village in Sulaymaniyah in August 1888.
The event was only discovered in 2020 because documents describing it are written in an ancient Ottoman Turkish language that is difficult to translate.
The documents, written by local authorities and sent to the government, describe how “a strong bright light accompanied by smoke moved towards a village.”
The translation went on to say that meteorites fell “like rain” over a period of about ten minutes, killing one man and seriously injuring another.