Overview
- A daytime fireball on July 16, 2024 produced a sonic boom over the New York region and a 1.35-kilogram fragment crashed through a Hillsborough, New Jersey bedroom, where the homeowner immediately collected the pieces using gloves, aluminum foil, and glass jars.
- The sample’s fast, contamination-aware recovery preserved fragile minerals and organics that normally break down after landing, making these fragments unusually pristine for laboratory study.
- A multi-institution team published results on July 15, 2026 in Science Advances identifying the rock as an intermediate CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite that contains sodium-rich salts and a wide suite of organic molecules, including amino acids.
- Microscopy and chemical analyses show microscopic fractures filled with sodium-bearing salts left by ancient brines, which implies that salty fluids once altered the asteroid’s near-surface and drove organic-mineral chemistry there.
- Researchers are curating fragments for public display and are comparing Hillsborough’s salts and organics with samples returned by OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa2 while further work continues to refine the meteorite’s origin in the inner asteroid belt, possibly the Erigone family.