A rather unusual incident happened in the French town of Schirmeck. A local woman was relaxing on her terrace, talking to her friend. During the conversation, she was suddenly hit by a small object that looked like a piece of concrete. The object hit the woman with sufficient force, which left a bruise on the body. After careful examination, it turned out that it was probably an extraterrestrial rock – a meteorite of black and gray color. This was reported by the publication Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace.
If this is confirmed, it will be one of the extremely rare cases of a meteorite falling on a person in modern history. At least one of these incidents. The most famous case of this kind occurred in 1954, when a meteorite painfully hit a woman in the US state of Alabama: a space rock broke through the roof of her house and left a huge bruise on her body.
Last year, a group of researchers estimated that more than 5 thousand tons of asteroid and comet dust fall on the surface of our planet every year. However, it is rare that the larger space material does not have time to burn completely, but reaches the surface. But the rarest cases happen when space rocks hit people.
In 2020, researchers studying the archives of Ottoman Kurdistan found documentation indicating that in 1888, a meteorite fell and paralyzed one person and killed another. Another manuscript dated 1677 described how an Italian monk was killed by a stone that “hit him from the clouds”.
In May of this year, a meteorite broke through the roof of a house in New Jersey. In 2021, a rare meteorite fell on a driveway in England. And in 2013 – already ten years ago – a meteorite fell in Chelyabinsk, Russia, breaking windows and injuring hundreds of people, although no one died then. The Chelyabinsk meteorite was the largest to fall to Earth in this century.
It is worth noting that the fallen meteorites can be billions of years old, that is, they date back to the period of the formation of the Solar System. Therefore, such rocks can have scientific and even material value, because from time to time such “extraterrestrial guests” are put up for auction.
Earlier we reported about why astronomers did not warn about the “Kyiv bolide”?
According to Gizmodo
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