A science museum in Georgia is studying a piece of a meteor that blazed over the Southeast last week and was later recovered by a local meteorite hunter.
The 3-foot meteor splintered in the air in broad daylight, littering Newton County — about 40 miles southeast of Atlanta — with fragments scattered around the area.
The rock caused a sonic boom equivalent to 20 tons of TNT exploding at once, which shook the region.
Eager meteorite hunters quickly began to scour the county for any pieces of the rock still intact — and one lucky fanatic’s hard work paid off.
The hunter and member of the Meteorite Association of Georgia, whose identity was not immediately known, voluntarily turned the fragment over to the museum to be added to its sprawling collection alongside pieces from 28 other sizable meteors that have landed in the state.
”First of all, I thought, ‘Wow, that is really cool. The fact that I’m now holding it is just like, ‘Oh, OK’,” Karisa Zdanky, astronomy program manager at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, told WRDW.
“While meteors themselves are not uncommon, one that is during the day, that is so big that so many people are able to see it is a lot rarer.”
Dozens of people captured footage of the fireball flying over Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia last week. Many onlookers were confounded, and even the National Weather Service wasn’t certain what it was at first.
The NWS originally warned Newton County officials that “more could possibly be on the way,” but only one made landfall.
Museum officials surmised the rock was a billion-year-old “stony meteorite.”
“It is the material that is from the very beginning of the solar system, so if we study these, we can learn about what the environment was like, and how they were forming and how the planets were formed,” Rebecca Melsheimer, the museum’s curatorial coordinator, told the outlet.
“There’s so much that’s out there in the world and outside of the world that we can learn and experience and while that’s kind of the dramatic thing, you know, you see it and it’s bright and it’s beautiful. But the information that we can get from this scientifically is even more beautiful.”
One piece of the meteor shot through the ceiling of a Georgia home. The fragment’s impact, which created a hole about the size of a golf ball, left the owner in sheer “awe,” officials said.
The museum has begun studying the fragment and will have it on display by the end of the summer.
The Post reached out to the Meteorite Association of Georgia for more information about their member’s coveted find.