A meteorite crash into a doorbell camera in front of a house in Canada

Canadian homeowners returned home in July 2024 to find a star-shaped gray dust pattern in the driveway outside their Prince Edward Island home.

Curious about the dust, the homeowners checked the video footage from the security camera and saw an amazing moment – it looked like a stone. meteorite Scientists from the University of Alberta have reported that they fell from space and crash-landed on their sidewalk. their findings from an accident earlier this week.

Footage from an alarm doorbell camera shows a delicate scene framed by a security camera for about five seconds before something suddenly appears in the frame and crashes into what appears to be a house’s driveway at the edge of a stone driveway.

The crash sounds like glass breaking or a pot falling as a meteorite hits the sidewalk. Chris Herd, a science professor at the University of Alberta, said it was the first video recording of the sound and sight of a meteor falling.

“No meteorite impact has ever been fully documented with this kind of sound,” Herd said in a statement. “It adds a whole new dimension to the island’s natural history.”

Herd – is also the curator of the university meteorite collection – arrived at the scene 10 days after a possible meteorite crash to document the origin of pieces found by homeowners. They took 7 grams of rock from the grass next to the walkway and took more samples using a vacuum and a magnet. The swarm also measured a 2 x 2 cm divot in the passage formed by the impact.

He found that the pieces were indeed a meteorite, and said it was a common chondrite with properties that helped explain why it disintegrated when it hit the ground.

Meteorites can fall to Earth, but this is often rare. In May 2023 another homeowner reported a meteorite falling on his roof in New Jersey.

Derrick Pitts, senior astronomer at the Franklin Institute, told CBS Philadelphia at the time: “For it to actually hit a house, for people to be able to pick it up, it’s really unusual and it’s happened very few times in history.”

contributed to this report.