A piece of space rock that crashed into a home in Atlanta, Georgia, had been zooming around in space for longer than Earth has existed, a recent analysis has found.
The newly named McDonough Meteorite that punched through Earth's atmosphere on 26 June 2025 formed around 4.56 billion years ago, according to planetary geologist Scott Harris of the University of Georgia.
Our home planet, for context, is thought to be around 4.5 billion years old – making the tiny fragments of rock that survived the impact at least a few hundred million years older.
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"This particular meteor that entered the atmosphere has a long history before it made it to the ground of McDonough, and in order to totally understand that, we actually have to examine what the rock is and determine what group of asteroids it belongs to," Harris explains.
The rock ended its space-faring days striking Earth's atmosphere, heating up and exploding in a spectacular fireball as it whistled through the sky. A piece of the meteorite then crashed through the roof of a suburban home in Atlanta's south-east, leaving a dent on the floor where it had shattered on impact.
Harris and his colleagues obtained 23 of the precious 50 grams recovered from the house, and subjected it to optical and electron microscopy. The results suggest that it's an L-type ordinary chondrite, a stony rock that initially formed billions of years ago before experiencing a catastrophic event that put it on an eventual collision course with Earth.
"It belongs to a group of asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that we now think we can tie to a breakup of a much larger asteroid about 470 million years ago," Harris says.
"But in that breakup, some pieces get into Earth-crossing orbits, and if given long enough, their orbit around the Sun and Earth's orbit around the Sun end up being at the same place, at the same moment in time."
The fragment will continue to be stored at the University of Georgia for further analysis that may reveal something about the conditions of the early Solar System before the planets formed.
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