Overview

• A surviving piece of the June 26 fireball struck a McDonough, Georgia, home and was recovered within days for study
• Scott Harris and UGA colleagues used optical and electron microscopy to classify the sample as an ordinary L chondrite
• Radiometric dating indicates the rock formed roughly 4.560 billion years ago, making it older than Earth
• Researchers traced the fragment’s origin to the main asteroid belt and linked it to a 470-million-year-old breakup event
• UGA will preserve the 23 grams of material for future research and expects modern detection methods and public reporting to boost meteorite recoveries