With all the abundance of cosmic sediments of several tens of tons of dust and rocks, not much material reaches the Earth’s surface every day. Even fewer fall on land rather than in the oceans, and very little in front of witnesses. Fortunately, a variety of video recording systems increase the chances of capturing these rather rare events. For the first time, an electronic door peephole did this in the Canadian wilderness. This is likely the first time that video and sound of a meteorite hitting the ground has been captured.
Image source: Joe Velaidum/Laura Kelly
The incident was filmed on Canada’s Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown. The couple living in the house went to walk their dogs and minutes later a loud bang was heard from the yard. This happened last summer. Subsequent viewing of the recordings from the electronic peephole showed that near the threshold something crashed to the ground with a loud sound.
The impact left a mark on the paving slabs with a diameter of about two centimeters. Pieces of a fallen object were found in the grass nearby. They were sent to the University of Alberta for study. The analysis showed that the samples were ordinary chondrites, meteorites composed of non-metallic minerals that formed at the dawn of the solar system and have changed little since then.
The vast majority of meteorites discovered on Earth (90%) are chondrites. In principle, cases of their falling have already fallen into the cameras of lenses in the sky more than once. But to record this moment with sound at the moment it hits the ground – Canadians were very lucky in this. They were even luckier. According to the man, just a couple of minutes before the impact he stood in the very place where the stone hit from the sky. He would definitely have suffered a direct hit to the body.
Image source: University of Alberta