Astronomers don’t think the rock came from space
In a viral story, a French woman describes how she was injured when she was struck by a rock from space. But experts suggest I that all is not what it seems. The woman, a resident of Schirmeck in the French department of Bas-Rhin, said that she was sitting on her terrace on 6 July when she heard a shock on the roof. A pebble then fell off the roof and hit her at rib level. “I heard a big ‘poom’ coming from the roof next to us. In the second that followed, I felt a shock in the ribs. I thought it was an animal, a bat,” the woman said. “We thought it was a piece of cement, the one we apply to the ridge tiles, but it didn’t have the colour.”
An image of the suspected space rock showed it was black with sharp edges. But l’Observatoire de Paris astronomer Jérémie Vaubaillon explained that the rock is definitely not from space. “The pictures clearly show this is not a meteorite. These rocks have way too many angles to be meteorites. Remember that during its flight in the atmosphere, the initial rock melts because of the surrounding superhot plasma,” Vaubaillon said. “Picture an ice cube melting – there are no angular pieces left. The same is happening for a meteorite as it passes through the atmosphere.”
The rock also has a ‘bubbled’ and irregular surface. This feature is common with volcanic rocks: bubbles of lava are frozen as the molten rock quickly cools. Space rocks that pass through Earth’s atmosphere, on the other hand, tend to have smooth surfaces due to the heat they experience and the melting it causes, as Vaubaillon noted.
Few people doubt that something struck the French woman on 6 July. But Vaubaillon isn’t the only expert expressing scepticism about the offending rock supposedly coming from space. François Colas, an astronomer with the Fireball Recovery and InterPlanetary Observation Network (FRIPON) sky surveillance network, explained that when a meteorite falls from the sky, it tends to arrive at the surface at approximately 300 kilometres (186 miles) per hour after being slowed by its passage through the atmosphere. If the 6 July rock were a meteorite, it should have damaged the roof when it hit. But that didn’t happen here, Colas said. Additionally, FRIPON monitors the sky over France for flashes of light caus
