This is only the third time that a meteorite fragment has been found in a private home in France since the start of the 21st century.
She found the alien stone in her garden. A resident of Cher discovered a fragment of meteorite on her land last Tuesday after its fall, on the night of September 9 to 10, reports the specialized site Vigie-ciel. This is only the third discovery of this type in France since the start of the 21st century.
50,000 km/h in the sky
The celestial object sped through the Earth’s sky at 50,000 km/h and crashed in the region of Argent-sur-Sauldre, between Bourges (Cher) and Orleans (Loiret), around midnight at a person who wished to remain anonymous. Several hundred people observed the burst of light from the meteorite that night, in several towns in France, sometimes far from the point of fall.
The next day, September 10, debris was found in this Cher garden, near a table. The recording of a surveillance camera made it possible to record the sound of the shock.
Faced with the unusual appearance of the debris, the resident contacted a specialized center in the department which relayed this information to the Parisian FRIPON center (Network for the recovery of fireballs (shooting stars of the bolide type) and interplanetary observation).
Experts are then dispatched to carry out a survey of the fragments of the meteorite. They then reconstructed the alien object, which weighs 714 grams.
Most meteorites are lost
“We think that there are one or two meteorites per year which fall on French territory. Unfortunately, in France, we have a lot of fields and forests and therefore it is very difficult to find them all, most are lost”, explains Sylvain Bouley, professor of planetology and Earth sciences at Paris Saclay University, who directly observed the pieces of rock.
For scientists, meteorites are real wells of information about space, as Brigitte Zanda, a teacher researcher and meteorite expert who also saw the fragments that fell on September 10, explains to BFMTV.
“A new meteorite can be a new window on a moment in the formation of the solar system, a place in the primitive solar system, it can completely revolutionize our ideas,” she explains.
The researcher emphasizes that the interest in discovering and studying meteorites, “is to compare them with each other and to have an idea of an evolution. This tells us a little about the processes which were the work at the time when the solar system was formed”.
One of the fragments has been given to the Paris Natural History Museum for analysis, but we do not yet know how long these examinations will take. The rest of the stellar object belongs to its discoverer. This find comes seven months after the identification of another meteorite, in Normandy.
Source: BFM TV
