Hundreds of people witnessed a huge explosion in the sky last when year when a meteor burned up over Flensburg, Germany.
Now it’s been revealed that part of the space rock survived its journey into Earth’s atmosphere and then landed into an unsuspecting man’s garden.
An object weighing 24.5 grammes fell to the surface of our planet and was found sitting in the middle of an unnamed person’s lawn.
The meteorite was very small but could have caused a nasty injury if it hit someone as it fell to Earth.
Researchers from the University of Munster wrote: ‘A fireball in the sky, accompanied by a bang, amazed hundreds of eyewitnesses in northern Germany in mid-September last year.
‘The reason for the spectacle was a meteoroid entering the Earth’s atmosphere and partially burning up.
‘One day after the observations, a citizen in Flensburg found a stone weighing 24.5 grams and having a fresh black fusion crust on the lawn of his garden.’
Analysis of the object showed it’s made from minerals that formed on tiny proto-planets which came into being during in the early days of our solar system.
These objects ‘can be regarded as possible building blocks of the Earth that delivered water’, the team added.
This means they could show how water and the chemicals which are necessary to the evolution of all living beings arrived on our planet from space.
“The meteorite of Flensburg belongs to an extremely rare meteorite class and is the only meteorite fall of this class in Germany proving that 4.56 billion years ago there must have been small bodies in the early solar system storing liquid water,’ said Professor Addi Bischoff.
‘Perhaps such bodies also delivered water to the Earth.’
