A suspected meteorite fragment crashed through the roof of a house in Houston, it has been reported, after residents in the area said they saw light flashes and a loud boom over the Texas city.
The Brenham Fire Department responded to reports of an explosion near Highway 50 on Saturday.
But Sherrie James, a resident in Houston, told Fox 26 she had contacted Ponderosa Fire Department, describing how a piece of rock had landed in her home that could have come from space.
James said that the rock had pierced the roof and entered her daughter’s bedroom, although no one was in the room at the time and no one was hurt. She provided images to the outlet which showed a large hole in her ceiling and flooring and a football-sized black rock that appeared to have broken off a larger chunk of material.
Brenham Fire Department issued a statement on Facebook about the incident, under which social media users described seeing a fireball and a loud boom, lasting up to seven seconds. The fire service initially believed that the rock had fallen from a plane but later said that it was likely part of a meteorite.
The object exploded over Houston just before 4.40 p.m. according to the American Meteor Society, which calculated the most likely path of the object was through the atmosphere near Magnolia before it descended toward Monroe.
A geostationary lightning mapper picked up the infrared flash that accompanied the explosion and a boom was heard across the northern/northwestern Houston metropolitan area, the X account MyRadar Weather reported.
NASA issued a statement about the incident. It said that a meteor was first seen around 50 miles above Stagecoach, a town northwest of Houston.
It then moved southeast at 35,000 mph, breaking apart 29 miles above Bammel, just west of Cypress Station. “The fragmentation of the meteor, which weighed about a ton with a diameter of 3 feet, created a pressure wave that caused booms,” the NASA post added.
The incident comes days after a bigger space object was spotted over Lake Erie, near Cleveland, Ohio, on March 17. Witnesses in Pittsburgh reported a burning object streaking through the sky.
Around 17,000 meteorites strike the Earth’s surface each year, although verified records of injury or death by direct impact
are extremely rare, according to EarthDate.org.
