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Representational image
(VitaliyPozdeyev, Getty images/Bill Ingalls, NASA/via Canva)
Can you imagine quietly sipping coffee and minding your own business when a random rock coming all the way from outer space decides to pick beef with you? As outlandish as this sounds, this is exactly what happened to a woman in the village of Alsace located in eastern France.
As per the French newspaper Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace (DNA), the woman was sitting outside on her terrace, chatting with a friend when the mysterious pebble hit her in the ribs earlier this month, on July 6.
While calling the object a pebble could make it sound harmless, it still managed to leave a bruise.
“I heard a big ‘Poom’ coming from the roof next to us. In the second that followed, I felt a shock on the ribs,” the unidentified woman told the French newspaper.
She mistook it for an animal, perhaps a bat, at first, but she soon realised that it resembled a piece of cement — the kind applied to ridge tiles. Except, it was colourless.
When she got it checked by a local roofer, he suggested that it could be a meteorite. Further examination by geologist Dr Thierry Rebmann only confirmed its extraterrestrial origins.
Meteorites are space rocks that survive their journey through the Earth’s atmosphere and hit the ground. They can be rocky, metallic, or a combination of the two. Most meteoroids disintegrate when they speed through our planet’s atmosphere at tens of thousands of kilometres per hour. And of those that do make it to the ground in some form, a very tiny percentage of the original object survives.
As for this meteorite, consisting of iron and silicon, the object itself didn’t seem rare. But the fact that it struck a person is extremely out of the ordinary. In fact, a 2016 account suggested that the odds of getting killed by a meteorite is about 1 in 250,000.
What made the encounter stranger still was that it was rare to discover meteors in temperate climate zones like France. Officials have only recorded five instances of meteorites landing in France so far in the twenty-first century.
“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,” stated Dr Rebmann, who thinks that scientists should study the rock to determine its origins.
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