Meteorite That Crashed Into Home Turns Out to Be a Find

A New Jersey homeowner thought a cabinet had torn off the wall when his house shuddered one morning in July 2024. Instead, it was something that had crossed the solar system and punched through his roof. As Robin George Andrews reports in the New York Times, a 115-pound asteroid that NASA initially assumed burned up in the atmosphere actually sent a roughly 3-pound fragment into a Hillsborough bedroom—onto the couple's bed, to be exact. After spotting a ceiling hole and "onyx-colored" rocks on the pillow, the owners spent weeks collecting every speck of debris, then two years keeping it all from public view.

Their meticulous work paid off. A new paper in Science Advances finds the "Hillsborough meteorite" is an unusually pristine CM chondrite packed with complex organic molecules and evidence of salty water—materials thought to have helped seed early Earth with the chemistry for life. Scientists now believe the rock's journey began in the outer asteroid belt, surviving hundreds of millions of years and multiple collisions before ending in suburban New Jersey. For the full cosmic detective story, read Andrews' piece in the Times here.