A woman has claimed she was hit by a meteorite the size of a golf ball, having initially thought she’d been struck by an animal like a bat.
The unnamed French woman said she felt a ‘shock’ on her ribs on 6 July at around 4am, having first heard a loud noise on the roof next to her.
She had been sitting on her patio with a friend at her home in Schirmeck, a commune in the Bas-Rhin department in Grand Est, north-eastern France, when the incident happened.
At first she thought the object that hit her was an animal, then that it may have been a piece of cement, but after seeing the rock she now believes it was a meteorite.
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According to NASA, a meteorite is a piece of debris from an object – such as a comet, asteroid or meteoroid – from outer space.
It is able to survive its passage through our atmosphere, eventually falling on the surface of a planet or moon.
The woman who claims she had an unexpected encounter with one told local newspaper Les Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace: “I heard a big ‘poom’ coming from the roof next to us.
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“In the second that followed, I felt a shock on the ribs. I thought it was an animal, a bat.
“We thought it was a piece of cement, the one we apply to the ridge tiles, but it didn't have the colour.”
The space rock, which was about the same size as a golf ball and weight around 50g, even left bruising her ribs.
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The woman took her unidentified and painful object to Dr Theirry Rebmann, a geologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
He said it contained both iron and silicon, a mixture that is typical of meteorites.
Speaking to France Bleu Alsace, Dr Rebmann said: “Finding a meteor is already uncommon, but to be in direct contact and have it fall on you, that is astronomically rare.
“We haven't seen that in decades in this region.”
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He continued: “It's very rare, in our temperate environments, to find them.
“They merge with other elements. On the other hand, in a desert environment, we can find them more easily.”
Topics: Space, World News, Weird
Jess Hardiman