NEW JERSEY — A celestial visitor weighing over two pounds (1 kilogram) tore through a New Jersey home’s roof two years ago and holds the potential to reveal secrets about ancient water in our solar system.
On July 16, 2024, residents across the northeastern United States—encompassing New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania—witnessed a daytime spectacle as a fiery object blazed across the sky. This fireball careened just south of the Statue of Liberty, leaving in its wake a sonic boom that reverberated through New York City and much of New Jersey.
This dramatic event was caused by a meteorite, akin to the heft of a loaded airline suitcase, which rocketed through our atmosphere at an astounding 32,000 miles per hour (14.4 kilometers per second).
Not just any space rock, this particular meteorite was unusually fragile, shattering approximately 22 miles (35.4 kilometers) aboveground. The fragments were subsequently tracked by Doppler weather radar at Newark Liberty International Airport, tracing their descent from Staten Island into New Jersey.
Amid this cosmic disassembly, a single fragment survived the fiery journey, making a dramatic entry into a master bedroom in Hillsborough, New Jersey, by crashing through its ceiling.
The impact caused no injuries, and the homeowners quickly put on disposable gloves and collected the black fragments and dust from the bed and carpet using aluminum foil and glass jars, said Peter Jenniskens, senior research scientist at the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.
Jenniskens is the lead author of a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances that detailed an analysis of the Hillsborough meteorite.
The homeowners also patched the roof of their house before rain fell that evening – a crucial step because the fragile meteor is porous and sucks in water from the air, Jenniskens said.
Such quick thinking prevented the meteorite from being overly contaminated. Scientists were able to study the object. The analysis revealed it to be a rare, primitive type of meteorite that provides a window into the early solar system.
“We detected a complex suite of amino acids, the fundamental building blocks of proteins, in water extracts of the Hillsborough meteorite,” said study coauthor Dr. Danny Glavin, senior scientist for the Sample Return in the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“Most of the amino acids detected in Hillsborough are rare or nonexistent in life on Earth, so they are truly extraterrestrial in origin.”
A salty, cosmic time capsule
A detailed analysis of the Hillsborough meteorite showed it was a CM-type carbonaceous chondrite. The C stands for carbonaceous, while the M signifies the Mighei meteorite, a carbonaceous chondrite that fell in Ukraine in 1889.
These space rocks are remnants of rocky bodies that were streaking around during the early days of the solar system and contain hydrated minerals and organic compounds.
There are two types of primitive CM meteorites – CM1 and CM2 – and the biggest difference between them is how much water altered their composition while they were attached to a larger asteroid.
The researchers classified the Hillsborough meteorite as a CM since it exists as an intermediate between the two types. The sample marks only the second time a CM meteorite has been witnessed falling to Earth, Jenniskens noted, but it’s the first one that researchers have been able to study in such a pristine sample. Similar meteorites that fell in Indonesia in 2020 dropped into the mud, Jenniskens said.
“It is the first CM type meteorite that contained bits of rock that preserved the subsurface of the original asteroid,” Jenniskens said via email. “We really have a unique window here on the physical properties of the parent asteroid.”
The Hillsborough meteorite may have once belonged to a larger space rock orbiting within the inner asteroid belt, located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
“Some time ago, a significant asteroid family was formed in a large collision and some 6 Myr ago a smaller collision destroyed one of these asteroids, from which a piece ended up in near-Earth orbit,” Jenniskens wrote. “That piece experienced heat/cold cycles from spinning in the sunlight and fragmented about 200,000 years ago. Then it still took that long to hit the small target of Earth.”
Researchers detected high abundances of sodium, likely from icy brines within the original asteroid. As water evaporated on the space rock, it left behind concentrated salt minerals that could create molecules crucial for life as we know it, according to the researchers.
The team also detected organic carbon and complex amino acids.
“There are hundreds of amino acids in this meteorite and the majority of them do not occur naturally on Earth,” Glavin wrote in an email. “The suite of amino acids in Hillsborough was even more diverse than those found in pristine samples returned from the carbon-rich asteroids Bennu and Ryugu.”
The researchers are working to identify the salt minerals within the Hillsborough meteorite and see how they compare with those identified in samples collected from Bennu and Ryugu during NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission in 2020 and Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission in 2019, respectively.
Fragments of the Hillsborough meteorite are being curated at the American Museum for Natural History in New York City.
Delivering the ingredients for life
Primitive carbonaceous chondrites are believed to be the type of space rocks that collided with early Earth and delivered organic matter.
The Hillsborough meteorite “provides more evidence that meteorite delivery of organic matter to the early Earth could have been an important source of organic molecules necessary for the origin of life,” Glavin said.
The discovery of brine on the asteroid is key, said Peter Brown, professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Western University in London, Ontario, noting it’s kind of a leftover “of percolating water or ice.” Brown was not involved in the study.
The brine “is a really strong sort of indicator of how water has moved, evolved and in particular how it’s reacted with organics,” Brown told CNN.
“Everything we can learn about how water changes this kind of primitive meteorite is super important to sort of astrobiology and early biology on Earth.”
Water may have been preserved beneath the surface of the Hillsborough meteorite’s parent asteroid for an extended period, he said.
Meteorites such as the Hillsborough one contain the chemistry of the early solar system because, while modified by water, they haven’t endured much heating, Brown said. Holding a meteorite like it feels more like soil or clay that falls apart, rather than a solid rock, which reflects its lack of exposure to heat – and a higher chance of preserving a snapshot of how water interacted with minerals and organics, he added.
The swift, informed actions of the homeowners enabled the detection of the brine in the first place, Brown noted. Rainfall likely caused any additional meteorite fragments that fell outside to disintegrate.
The homeowners quickly connected with study coauthor Mike Hankey at the American Meteor Society, who guided them through preserving the sample and minimizing contamination.
“We knew almost immediately that what happened to us was incredibly rare and we felt a responsibility to preserve the meteorite for the scientific community,” the homeowners, who wished to remain anonymous to protect their privacy, shared via email. “It’s still surreal to think that this meteorite traveled through space for millions of years before ending its journey in our home. The entire experience has been incredible, and we’re honored to have played a small part in advancing scientific understanding through its study.”
Reporting doorbell or dashcam videos of potential fireball sightings can help researchers track and collect meteorites – and ultimately improve their understanding of how the solar system evolved.
