Overview

• On June 26 a fireball streaked over Atlanta at about 47,000 km/h before shedding a tomato-sized piece that broke through Mr. McDonough’s roof and dented his living-room floor.
• University of Georgia researchers recovered roughly 50 grams of the fragment—dubbed 'McDonough'—and have examined 23 grams under optical and electron microscopes.
• Lab dating places the specimen at approximately 4.56 billion years old, making it about 20 million years older than Earth and confirming its identity as an ordinary, low-metal chondrite.
• Scientists link the fragment to a larger asteroid that fragmented around 470 million years ago, scattering debris into orbits that eventually intersected Earth’s path.
• The archived sample at UGA will undergo further isotopic and impact-dynamics analyses ahead of a forthcoming peer-reviewed publication by Scott Harris’s team.