Meteorite Older Than Earth Hits House

On Thursday, June 26, 2025, a fireball hit a house in McDonough, Georgia, leaving a hole in the roof of the house. Scott Harris, a geologist at the University of Georgia (UGA), said the meteorite is older than the Earth.

The house in McDonough had numerous pieces of the meteorite torn through the roof. One chunk, approximately the size of a cherry tomato, hit the floor, making a dent bigger than a US quarter-dollar coin. It landed 14 feet (4.25 meters) away from the homeowner.

Around 50 grams (1.76 ounces) of the meteorite was recovered, and Scott Harris studied 23 grams of it. He used strong microscopes and found out it was a Chondrite — a stony meteorite made from material created approximately when our Solar System formed.

Mr. Harris’s tests reveal the meteorite is around 4.56 billion years old, which is 20 million years older than the Earth (the Earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old). He said, “It belongs to a group of asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that we now think we can tie to a breakup of a much larger asteroid about 470 million years ago.”

Many meteors crash into Earth daily, but lots are tiny — around the size of a grain of sand — and they burn to dust. Pieces of bigger meteors that hit the ground without burning are called meteorites.

A meteor is a piece of ancient rock from space that drops to Earth. As it passes the Earth’s atmosphere, it radiates. A fireball is a bright meteor. Fireballs are mostly found at night, but the meteor in June was seen in daylight. It made a “sonic boom,” which happens when an object goes faster than the speed of sound (approximately 767 mph or 1,235 kph).

NASA said the meteor was most likely around 40 inches (1 meter) across and was traveling at about 29,000 mph (46,670 kph) when it went through Earth’s atmosphere.

The meteorite was the 27th one recovered in Georgia. Robert Lunsford of the American Meteor Society, who tracks and verifies fireball reports worldwide, says, “On a personal level, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but we might get one per month.” “This is something that used to be expected once every few decades and not multiple times within 20 years. Modern technology, in addition to an attentive public, is going to help us recover more and more meteorites,” Scott Harris said.

Scientists at UGA and Arizona State University are continuing to study the meteorite.

SOURCES:

https://newsforkids.net/articles/2025/08/14/meteorite-that-hit-house-is-older-than-earth/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/science/meteor-georgia-older-than-earth.html?searchResultPosition=1

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/us/fire-ball-south-carolina-georgia-tennessee.html?searchResultPosition=3