A couple in Canada narrowly missed being struck by a meteorite that crashed outside their home just two minutes after they had left for a walk — and their doorbell camera captured the space rock’s crash.
One evening last July, Joe Velaidum and his partner, Laura Kelly, of Prince Edward Island in Canada, returned home from walking their dogs, when they found their brick walkway splotched with dusty debris in a star-shaped pattern. A rare recording captured on their doorbell camera showed a fast-moving space rock hurtling out of nowhere and smashing into the ground with a loud crash and an explosive burst of gray dust.
“The shocking thing for me is that I was standing right there a couple of minutes right before this impact,” Velaidum told CBC News. “It probably would’ve ripped me in half.”
He and Kelly rinsed their walkway immediately after they found the debris. But they managed to recover about 0.24 ounces (7 grams) that had sprinkled onto an adjacent patch of grass and another 3.1 ounces (88 g) using a vacuum and a magnet. The duo submitted the samples and video recording to the University of Alberta, where Chris Herd, a geologist and curator of the university’s meteorite collection, identified the event as a meteorite impact, according to a university statement.
On Monday (Jan. 13), The Meteoritical Society officially named it the Charlottetown meteorite after the Canadian city where it landed.
“This is the first time that we’ve been able to record the fall of a meteorite both in video and sound,” Herd told Canada’s CTV News. The meteorite was a run-of-the-mill stony chondrite that traveled to Earth from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it would have been traveling at least 125 mph (200 km/h) right before it struck, he said.
Space rocks are constantly hitting Earth’s atmosphere, but most go unnoticed, either burning up before they can reach the surface or landing in remote areas. The chances of witnessing a meteorite impact firsthand are extremely low, and very few people in history have been close to a meteorite at the exact moment of impact.
“We think our lives are so important when we fill it up with our egos, and there are these cosmic events that just dwarf our little concerns,” Velaidum told NPR. “And this is a tiny little event when it comes down to it in the cosmic scheme of things, but it’s such an eye-opener.”
