Meteorite Gatecrashes Breakfast

A New Zealand couple had an unexpected visitor from space at the weekend when a 1.3kg (2.8lb) meteorite crashed into their living room shortly before breakfast.

The meteorite came through the roof of Phil and Brenda Archer's house in the Auckland suburb of Ellerslie at 9.30am on Saturday morning.

"I was in the kitchen doing breakfast and there was this almighty explosion," Mrs Archer told Auckland's Sunday Star-Times newspaper. "I couldn't see anything, there was just dust. I thought something had exploded in the ceiling. Phil saw a stone under the computer and it was hot to touch."

The scorched rock bounced off a leather sofa and hit the ceiling a second time before coming to rest underneath the computer. The Archers were drying it out in their oven yesterday and plan to sell it to meteorite-hunters.

Joel Schiff, the editor of Meteorite Magazine and a fellow Auckland resident, visited the house hours after the impact.

"It was a bit like a bomb site," he told the Guardian. "There's a big hole right in the ceiling of the living room and the insulation is coming out of the hole. It made a very large indent in the sofa, bounced off and hit the ceiling again. There was a big dent in the ceiling, like you'd smashed it with your fist."

Tests at Auckland University today are expected to establish whether before it entered the atmosphere the rock had broken off from the outer surface of one of the asteroids drifting through the solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Most such asteroids are 4.6bn years old, the same age as the solar system.

A basketball-sized lump hit the atmosphere at around 33,000mph, before slowing down as it burnt up in the atmosphere until it was travelling at only a few hundred metres a second when it crashed through the Archers' roof tiles.

Even at that speed it would have been moving fast enough to kill on the spot and the Archers' one-year-old grandson had been playing in the room moments before it hit.

The only recorded case of a human being hit by a meteorite is a woman in Alabama, who was bruised by a 4kg rock which crashed through her roof and bounced off her radio in 1954.

New Zealand's slender land area and light urbanisation mean that the Ellerslie meteorite is only the ninth ever to have been found in the country.

More than 10,000 meteorites bigger than 10g are believed to hit the earth every day, but the majority land in the ocean or sparsely-populated areas and are never found.

The most dramatic meteor shower of recent years happened last March in Park Forest, a town in Illinois. Hundreds of meteorites damaged cars and houses, but Mr Schiff said such events are freak occurrences. "The Earth is passing through these belts of asteroids all the time but it's still a very rare and random event," he said.