Space and Physics
PUBLISHED
A bright fireball exploded over the Texan skies just a few days ago, and it seems to have dropped a meteorite right through the roof of a house in the Houston suburbs. There were no casualties, but Sherrie James Williams, who lives in the Spring area, north of central Houston, has a brand new hole in her roof.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.“I heard a big boom in my daughter’s room, and I thought maybe something just fell,” James Williams told local news station KHOU11 at the weekend. “My grandson went to check and said there was a hole in the ceiling … then I saw the rock, and I thought, ‘That looks like a meteor,’” she continued. James contacted the fire department, who first thought it was something from a plane, before finding out that there had been many reports of a fireball over Texas.
According to NASA, the fireball was traveling at a speed of 15.6 kilometers per second (9.7 miles per second). The object was about a meter across, and it broke apart, clearly leaving behind fragments.
“An analysis of the currently available data indicates that the meteor became visible at an altitude of 49 miles above Stagecoach, located northwest of Houston. It moved southeast at 35,000 miles per hour, breaking apart 29 miles above Bammel, just to the west of Cypress Station,” the NASA fireball website stated.
“The disintegration of the asteroidal fragment – which weighed about a ton with a diameter of 3 feet – unleashed an energy of 26 tons of TNT, creating a pressure wave that propagated to the ground and causing the booms heard by some in the area. Doppler weather radar shows meteorites falling to the ground between Willowbrook and Northgate Crossing.”
Meteors of such size are far from rare. There have been nine major fireballs reported in the US since February. What’s a bit peculiar is that in the last few weeks, three of them have come down over pretty urban areas and have been visible in the daytime. That means a higher number of eye-witness reports, video footage, and a higher possibility of meteorites hitting an object. In Germany early this month, a space rock reportedly hit a roof, and some meteorites may have been found following the Ohio fireball of last week.
Last year, a fireball over Atlanta dropped a meteorite through a roof that was discovered to be 20 million years older than Earth. Fortunately, on all these occasions, nobody was hurt. Only one person is known to have been hit by a meteorite and lived to tell the tale: Ann Hodge of Oak Grove, Alabama, back in 1953.
