Bright Fireball Spotted Speeding to Earth
In McDonough, Georgia, on June 26, 2025, fragments of a meteorite crashed through a resident’s roof. The piece was about the same size as a cherry tomato. The resident was unharmed, but a small piece of the fireball did make a dent in his living room floor. He was unsure if the damage would be covered by insurance, but overall, he was not too startled by the impact although he was a few feet away.
University of Georgia planetary geologist Scott Harris got his hands on dust and pieces from the meteorite. He discovered that this fireball could not make it to Earth in one piece resulting it to explode and scatter. Normally, meteorites like these can only be seen at night, but this one burned so bright that it was visible in the daytime. Citizens and drivers around the area reported that the impact was so loud they thought an earthquake was about to happen.
Dr. Harris and his colleagues used electron microscopy —which is a type of microscopy that uses a beam of electrons to produce high-resolution images of small objects— to discover something shocking. Microscopy is for drug discovery, understanding diseases, and the development of new materials
Around 470 million years ago, the meteor was thought to be a piece of a broken asteroid orbiting in the asteroid belt. The asteroid was formed 20 million years before Earth existed. Earth is around 4.54 billion years old. So, the meteorite is 4.56 billion years old.
In the belt, many asteroids can collide with one another, which leads to internal damage billions of years before they head towards Earth. “So we think it may have been traveling many, many hundreds of meters per second, even up to as much as one kilometer per second as it went through the house,” says Dr. Harris.
Now this fireball is known as the McDonough Meteorite that punched through the ceiling with the same energy as it did when it was still in the Solar System. Dr. Harris found it to be a low-metal ordinary chondrite. Ordinary chondrites have a high percentage of mineral grains. These are tiny grains that formed in stellar environments before the Solar System existed. Meteorites can drift into orbits that cross Earth and may eventually shift into Earth’s orbit. The discovery and study of meteorites like the McDonough Meteorite offer scientists a rare glimpse into the material that built our solar system.
Works Cited
“A Meteorite Older Than the Earth Just Crashed into Someone’s Living Room.” Popular Mechanics, 11 Aug. 2025, https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a65660666/a-meteorite-older-than-the-earth-just-crashed-into-someones-living-room/.
Harris, Chris. “A Meteorite Traveled Fast Enough to Pierce a Georgia Home.” CNN, 10 Aug. 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/10/us/meteorite-georgia-landed-age-research.