A woman has claimed she was hit by a meteorite the size of a golf ball, having initially thought she’d been struck by an animal like a bat.
The unnamed French woman said she felt a ‘shock’ on her ribs on 6 July at around 4am, having first heard a loud noise on the roof next to her.
She had been sitting on her patio with a friend at her home in Schirmeck, a commune in the Bas-Rhin department in Grand Est, north-eastern France, when the incident happened.
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At first she thought the object that hit her was an animal, then that it may have been a piece of cement, but after seeing the rock she now believes it was a meteorite.
According to NASA, a meteorite is a piece of debris from an object – such as a comet, asteroid or meteoroid – from outer space.
It is able to survive its passage through our atmosphere, eventually falling on the surface of a planet or moon.
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The woman who claims she had an unexpected encounter with one told local newspaper Les Dernières Nouvelles d'Alsace: “I heard a big ‘poom’ coming from the roof next to us.
“In the second that followed, I felt a shock on the ribs. I thought it was an animal, a bat.
“We thought it was a piece of cement, the one we apply to the ridge tiles, but it didn't have the colour.”
The space rock, which was about the same size as a golf ball and weight around 50g, even left bruising her ribs.
The woman took her unidentified and painful object to Dr Theirry Rebmann, a geologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
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He said it contained both iron and silicon, a mixture that is typical of meteorites.
Speaking to France Bleu Alsace, Dr Rebmann said: “Finding a meteor is already uncommon, but to be in direct contact and have it fall on you, that is astronomically rare.
“We haven't seen that in decades in this region.”
He continued: “It's very rare, in our temperate environments, to find them.
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“They merge with other elements. On the other hand, in a desert environment, we can find them more easily.”
Topics: Space, World News, Weird