A woman in British Columbia had a cosmically rude awakening earlier this month when a meteorite crashed through her ceiling and landed in her bed.
Ruth Hamilton, 66, told The New York Times that around 11:35 p.m. on Oct. 3, she woke up to her dog barking, then heard what she described as “an explosion.” Flicking on the light, she saw a hole in her ceiling and thought a falling tree must have hit the house. It wasn’t until she called 911 and was talking to an operator that she spotted a 2.8-pound meteorite between her pillows.
“I didn’t feel it,” Hamilton, who lives in the town of Golden, told CTV Vancouver. “It never touched me. I had debris on my face from the drywall, but not a single scratch.”
When Hamilton first saw the space rock, though, she didn’t know what it was. Police who responded to the scene first consulted with a nearby construction crew, thinking it could be debris from some kind of blast.
Workers said they hadn’t been blasting, but had seen a “bright ball in the sky,” police told CTV ― suggesting that the rock in Hamilton’s bed may have fallen from space. Researchers at the University of Western Ontario later confirmed the projectile was indeed a meteorite.
“I was shaking and scared when it happened, I thought someone had jumped in or it was a gun or something,” Hamilton told the Pipestone Flyer. “It’s almost a relief when we realized it could only have fallen out of the sky.”
Scientists at Western are asking residents of Golden and the surrounding area to keep an eye out for rocks that could be other meteorites, and to send any footage they have of the passing fireball.
In the meantime, researchers are still studying the meteorite that landed in Hamilton’s bed, but she ultimately plans to keep it.
“My granddaughters can say that their grandmother just almost got killed in her bed by a meteorite,” she told the Times.
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