A woman in Canada was allegedly woken by a meteorite crashing through her roof and landing on her bed while she was asleep.
According to The New York Times, 66-year-old Ruth Hamilton was sound asleep in her home in British Columbia when she was abruptly woken by something she later discovered to be out of this world, as a “rock” came plummeting through her roof and landed directly between the two pillows on her bed, where she had been led at the time of the “explosion.”
Fortunately, Hamilton didn’t appear to sustain any injuries from the incident, though the report notes that her face was left covered in “drywall debris” after the 2.8-pound rock hurtled through her roof and created a hole in the ceiling on the night of October 3. She immediately called emergenecy services and the police subsequently arrived at her home.
Hamilton says the officer on duty initially suspected the stray rock to have come from a construction site on a nearby highway, but they soon discovered “the workers had not done any blasting that night.” However, Professor Peter Brown from the University of Western Ontario later confirmed that the charcoal gray rock was a meteorite “from an asteroid.”
University of Calgary researchers shared reports from other local residents who claimed to have “heard two loud booms and seen a fireball streaking across the sky.” According to Professor Brown, these people likely witnessed the onset of a very rare event as the odds of a meteorite making such an intrusion in someone’s home is about one in 100 billion.
While it’s a known fact that meteoroids hurl towards Earth every single day, only some of them break through the atmosphere and stick a landing. On the occasions that they do hit the ground (or someone’s bed), scientists are presented with an unusual opportunity to study the space rocks and learn more about them based on their size, shape, mass, and more.
For instance, Scientists recently calculated that there is about a one in 1750 chance of the potentially hazardous Bennu asteroid hitting Earth between 2021 and 2300, while another group of researchers examined an asteroid that was discovered in an Algerian desert last year and determined it was actually a piece of an ancient planet older than Earth itself.
For even more about asteroids, find out why the metallic asteroid located between Mars and Jupiter has an estimated worth of $10,000 quadrillion, learn more about how a floating asteroid could play host to rotating habitats for humans to potentially colonize, and then take a closer look at an asteroid sample originating from a near-Earth object named Ryugu.
Adele Ankers is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow her on Twitter.
Thumbnail credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCAL/MPS/DLR/IDA