A meteorite that crashed through the roof of a New Jersey home last year contains the chemistry of alien life, according to scientists.
A “sonic boom” shook New York City after a space rock the size of a heavy airline bag blasted through the atmosphere and streaked past the Statue of Liberty at 32,000 miles per hour on July 16, 2024.
The meteor — seen by 60 eagle-eyed observers from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania — eventually broke apart in a cascade of pebbles over a stretch of Staten Island and New Jersey, according to the SETI Institute.
Shortly after, a two-pound chunk of the meteorite slammed straight into a house in Hillsborough and landed in a bedroom, according to scientists.
“I was at home at the time, heard a loud crash, and found a hole in the ceiling of the master bedroom,” the stunned homeowner described.
“I smelled a strong sulfur-like odor and saw many black fragments along with debris and black dust that covered my bed, carpet, and surrounding areas.”
The Garden State homeowner then quickly used disposable gloves and aluminum foil to preserve the fragments in glass jars.
A new study published on Wednesday in Science Advances revealed that the meteorite, named “Hillsborough,” may offer scientists a window into the origins of life.
Preserved bits on the surface of the primitive asteroid contained a high concentration of salty fluids, which could form molecules crucial to creating life on Earth, researchers said.
“A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a small primitive asteroid where it experienced concentrated salty fluids — a process not previously known from this type of proto-planet world,” lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley said in a statement.
“Thanks to the homeowner’s quick reaction, these are the most pristine CM1/2 meteorites we know of,” Jenniskens said.
A diverse array of carbon-bearing compounds, amino acids, and prebiotic molecules found on Hillsborough also sheds light on how the building blocks of early life reached our planet.
Some of the meteorite fragments will be curated at the American Museum of Natural History in the Big Apple.
“We are thrilled that nature delivered such a precious asteroid sample on our doorstep,” curator Denton Ebel said in a statement.
