Meteorite Crashes Through Ceiling and Lands on Woman’s Bed - The New York Times

After a fireball streaked through the Canadian sky, Ruth Hamilton, of British Columbia, found a 2.8-pound rock the size of a large man’s fist near her pillow.

The 2.8-pound rock the size of a large man’s fist had barely missed Ms.

On the night the meteorite crashed Ms.

Hamilton called 911, an officer who went into her house suggested at first that the stray rock may have originated from a blast from roadwork at a nearby highway, she said.

Hamilton did not sleep the rest of that night, she said, and sat in a chair, sipping tea as the meteorite sat on her bed.

Hamilton told local news outlets that she kept the news to herself at first, but she later reported the episode to researchers at the University of Western Ontario, where Peter Brown, a professor there, confirmed the rock was a meteorite “from an asteroid.”.

The odds of a meteorite hurtling into someone’s home and hitting a bed in any given year is about one in 100 billion, Professor Brown said.

Hamilton’s rock was one of two meteorites that hit Golden that night.

Researchers about 160 miles east, in Calgary, said they had traveled to the town to find the second one in a field less than a mile away from Ms.

Alan Hildebrand, an associate professor at the University of Calgary who studies meteorites, said that he and his fellow researchers were so happy to get their hands on the rock that “I think we hugged.”.

Scientists said they could also use the meteorites to reconstruct their paths from outer space through the atmosphere to the ground, at which point the rocks may have lost about 90 percent of their mass.