What are the chances of a meteor hitting the bedroom ceiling and landing on your pillow? Ruth Hamilton knows that can happen. The boulder coming from space exploded next to her face.
The woman from Golden City in Canada, 260 kilometers from the Olympic city of Calgary, had slept for several hours when she was woken up by a dog barking.
That gave her a moment of wakefulness, before a grayish-black stone from outer space slid through the ceiling into her bed with cosmic speed.
Hamilton said in an interview with CBS News Tuesday.
The nightly surprise caused Ruth to jump out of bed and immediately call the emergency number.
– The woman at the other end asked me all sorts of questions, and when I pulled out the two pillows I slept on the side, a meteor fell between them.
The stone the size of a watermelon fell from the atmosphere, straight across her bedroom ceiling, and rested comically on the flowering pillowcase—just inches from where she had just turned.
– She shivered like a poplar leaf after that. There you lie safely in bed and feel no danger, then suddenly a meteor lands in your bed.
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At first, Ruth Hamilton didn’t know that a meteorite had occurred in her bed.
The police officer who came to the scene to investigate the case, first thought that the stone came from a road that runs on the adjacent highway, which runs through the city of Golden in the Canadian mountains.
– He was summoned there and told that there had been no explosions that night. But workers saw a meteor, or shooting star, blasting through the air with just a few bangs. Then we realized it was a meteorite that crashed into my roof, explains Hamilton.
The woman reported the incident to a team of experts at Western University in London, and they confirmed that the intruder in her bedroom was a rock from the heights of the galaxy.
It is definitely a meteorite, said Peter Brown, professor of physics and astronomy at the university.
He says that everything about the accident agrees that it was a meteorite, because a fireball was also observed in the sky around the same time.
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Ruth now plans to send the somewhat threatening “gift of heaven” to Professor Brown and his team in London.
The astronomy professor hopes they will be able to determine the type of meteorite by the end of next month.
It is suspected that the rock fell from the largest asteroid belt in the solar system, the region between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter.
There’s something to think about the next time you put your head on the pillow.
Norway visited a meteorite this summer:
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