After a fireball struck the Canadian sky, Ruth Hamilton of British Columbia found a 2.8-pound stone near her pillow, the size of a big man's fist.

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Authors: John Yoon and Vjosa Isai

When Ruth Hamilton was asleep at her home in British Columbia, she was awakened by a dog barking, followed by an "explosion." She jumped up and turned on the light, only to see a hole in the ceiling. Her clock shows 11:35 p.m.

At first, the 66-year-old Ms. Hamilton thought that a tree had fallen on her house. But no, all the trees are there. She called 911 and noticed a huge charcoal-gray object between her two flower pillows while talking to the operator.

"Oh, my goodness," she recalled telling the operator, "I have a stone on my bed."

A meteorite, she only learned about it later.

Ms. Hamilton's head weighed 2.8 pounds, and it weighed 2.8 pounds. She barely touched Ms. Hamilton's head. She said, "I have drywall fragments all over my face." Her close contact on the night of October 3 made her uneasy, but it attracted the Internet and provided an unusual opportunity for scientists to study space rocks that crashed to Earth.

"It seems a bit surreal," Hamilton said in an interview on Wednesday. "Then I will go in and take a look at the room. Yes, there is a hole in my ceiling. Yes, it happened."

Meteor bodies are thrown at the earth every hour and every day. When they are large enough to survive the journey through the Earth’s atmosphere and land, they become meteorites. People collect them. Others eventually enter the museum. Some are sold on eBay. In February, Christie’s held a record-breaking rare meteorite auction with an auction value of more than 4 million U.S. dollars.

That night, Ms. Hamilton crashed in Golden, a town with 3,700 people, about 440 miles east of Vancouver. Other Canadians heard two loud noises and saw a fireball across the sky. According to researchers at the University of Calgary, some people have captured this phenomenon via video.

She said that after Ms. Hamilton called 911, a police officer who entered her home initially stated that the scattered rock may have come from a road construction explosion on a nearby highway. But the workers did not conduct any blasting that night.

Then the officer guessed another: "I think there is a meteorite on your bed."

Ms. Hamilton said that she didn't sleep for the rest of the night. She was sitting in a chair drinking tea and the meteorite was sitting on her bed. Ms. Hamilton told the local news media that she did not know the news at first, but then she reported the incident to researchers at the University of Western Ontario, where Professor Peter Brown confirmed that the rock was "a meteorite from an asteroid." "

The retired Ms. Hamilton said that she used to be a manager of a local chamber of commerce and she also told her family and friends. "My granddaughter can say that their grandmother was almost killed by a meteorite in bed," she said.

Meteorites have landed in people's homes and yards before. In 1982, a six-pound bomb hit a house in Wethersfield, Connecticut, tore the ceilings on the second and first floors, rolled into the living room, and then jumped from the door to the dining room. In 2020, an Indonesian coffin maker was taken aback by a 4.4-pound meteorite flying out of his roof.

Professor Brown said that in any given year, the chance of a meteorite rushing into someone's house and hitting the bed is about one in a thousand.

Ms. Hamilton’s rock was one of two meteorites that hit Golden that night. Researchers about 160 miles east of Calgary said that after triangulating their location based on photos and videos of several people around, they went to the town and found the second one less than a mile from Ms. Hamilton's home. Has been sent.

Alan Hildebrand, an associate professor of meteorite research at the University of Calgary, said that he and his researchers were happy to be able to put their hands on the rock, "I think we embraced."

Meteorites provide a rare opportunity for scientists to learn more about the solar system and the asteroid belt. Researchers can sample their materials instead of staring at them from a distance.

Scientists say they can also use meteorites to reconstruct their path from outer space through the atmosphere to the ground, at which point the rock may have lost about 90% of its mass. As they travel through the air, meteorites can heat to about 2,000 degrees Celsius, or more than 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, while traveling at 50 times the speed of sound, although they may feel cold when they reach the ground.

Ms. Hamilton said that after researchers have completed the study of the meteorite, she plans to keep it because it landed on her property. She hinted that she was lucky. Asked if she had bought lottery tickets the next day, she said no; she had already won.

"I was never hurt," she said. "I have been through this experience and I have never even scratched. So all I have to do is take a shower and wash off the dust from the drywall."