July 15, 2026, Mountain View, CA -- On July 16, 2024 a daytime meteor shook New York City with a sonic boom as it passed just south of the Statue of Liberty. Now, an international team of researchers reports in the journal Science Advances that a short time later, a more than two-pound meteorite crashed through the roof of a house in the town of Hillsborough, New Jersey.
"A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a primitive asteroid where it experienced concentrated salty fluids—a process not previously known from this type of proto planet world," said lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley.
On that day, a rock the size of a heavy airline bag entered the Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 32,000 miles/h (14.4 kilometers per second). Sixty observers from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island and
Pennsylvania reported seeing the meteor to the American Meteor Society, while sixteen in New York and New Jersey felt the shockwave.
"Our cameras in Northford, Connecticut, and Douglassville, Pennsylvania, as well as a doorbell camera in Wayne, New Jersey, captured the meteor, and from that we measured its trajectory," said American Meteor Society operations manager Mike Hankey. "The path traced back to low in the asteroid belt."
The rock was fragile and quickly broke into pieces. The meteor stopped being visible at an altitude of 22 miles (35 kilometers). After it faded, a Doppler weather radar at Newark Airport briefly detected a long cloud of falling pebbles stretching from Staten Island into New Jersey. Hillsborough was at the far end of that cloud, where the largest rocks came down. Only one was recovered because it hit a house.
The owner of the house described the scene as follows: "I was at home at the time, heard a loud crash and found a hole in the ceiling of the master bedroom. I smelled a strong sulfur-like odor and saw many black fragments along with debris and black dust that covered my bed, carpet and surrounding areas."
He then immediately preserved and documented the entire scene using disposable gloves and aluminum foil to place the meteorite fragments in glass jars.
When scientists examined the rocks, they determined it belonged to one of two known types of primitive meteorites called CM-type carbonaceous chondrites, where the letter "M" refers to the Mighei meteorite that fell in Ukraine in 1889.
According to paper co-author Mike Zolensky, a meteoriticist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, analysis of the Hillsborough meteorite found fragments that were more extensively altered by water on the meteorite's parent asteroid than is typically seen in CM2 carbonaceous chondrites and classified the specimen as a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite, an intermediate classification between petrographic types CM1 and CM2.
Hillsborough is the 22nd observed CM-type meteorite fall, but only the second witnessed fall of a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite, following the Kolang meteorite that fell in North Sumatra, Indonesia, in 2020. All others are CM2-types. No CM1-type falls have been witnessed.
"Thanks to the homeowner's quick reaction, these are the most pristine CM1/2 meteorites we know of," said Jenniskens.
Another prominent primitive type of carbonaceous chondrite is called CI, with "I" after the meteorite Ivuna that fell in Tanzania in 1938. Samples of this type were brought back in pristine condition from asteroid Ryugu by JAXA's Hayabusa 2 mission and from asteroid Bennu by NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission. They were found to contain ample evidence of the influence of briny fluids from just below the surface of their parent asteroid.
Zolensky and colleague JangMi Han found small salt-rich CM1 fragments within the Hillsborough meteorite, suggesting they originated from a near-surface region of the parent asteroid where liquid water evaporated and concentrated salts. They are now working to identify the salt minerals for comparison with similar phases found among samples returned to Earth from asteroids Ryugu and Bennu.
The high concentration of salt in briny fluids can potentially create molecules crucial to life on Earth. Brines allow phosphate to remain in solution and can catalyze chemical reactions between organics and precipitate minerals.
"Isotope studies of carbon and nitrogen suggest that primitive carbonaceous chondrites, including CM-types, delivered organic matter to the early Earth," said cosmochemist Queenie Chan of Royal Holloway University of London, England, and biogeochemist Nana Ogawa of the Biogeochemistry Research Center at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. "The Hillsborough meteorite contained 1.8% by weight of carbon and 0.07% of nitrogen, and had carbon and nitrogen isotopes typical for CM-type meteorites."
The meteorite contained a wide variety of soluble organic compounds, and its compositional range confirms that the Hillsborough meteorite was more altered by water than most other CM-type meteorites.
"A high fraction of compounds were the product of organic chemistry with minerals," said organic mass spectrometry specialist Phil Schmitt-Kopplin of Technical University Munich. "We do not know if these magnesium organic compounds were contributed by brine chemistry or were simply left over from earlier impact shock processes."
In living organisms, organo-metallic compounds are found in blood and used in photosynthesis. Among the soluble organic compounds were also many amino acids, similar to those found in more moderately altered CM2 chondrites.
Astrobiologist Danny Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and his team in Goddard's Astrobiology Analytical Lab, concluded that the delivery of amino acids, carboxylic acids, and other soluble organic molecules by CM-type bodies may have contributed to the prebiotic organic inventory that preceded the emergence of life on Earth. Their analysis suggests the complex distribution of amino acids observed in the Hillsborough meteorite formed within the parent body, likely assisted by brine fluid chemistry.
Some of the meteorite fragments will be curated at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
"We are thrilled that nature delivered such a precious asteroid sample on our doorstep," said curator Denton Ebel.
Read the original paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ea2105
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