Space Invader

Ruth Hamilton had a rude awakening earlier this month when a large meteorite plunged from space, through her roof and landed in her bed.

The resident of Golden, British Columbia, woke up to the sound of a crash and her dog barking.

"I've never been so scared in my life," Hamilton, 66, told the Canadian Press of the Oct. 3 incident that occurred about 11:35 p.m. "I wasn't sure what to do so I called 911 and, when I was speaking with the operator, I flipped over my pillow and saw that a rock had slipped between two pillows."

A police officer arrived on the scene, but suspected the object that landed in Hamilton's bed was from a nearby construction site.

"He called the [construction site] and they said they hadn't done a blast but that they had seen an explosion in the sky and, right then and there, we realized it was a meteorite," she told the Canadian Press.

It turns out that the 2.8-pound space rock, about the size of a small cabbage, was part of a meteor shower identified by Alan Hildebrand, a planetary scientist in the Department of Geoscience at the University of Calgary, and his colleagues. The group said the trajectory of the meteorite that hit Hamilton's house would have made it visible throughout southeastern British Columbia and central and southern Alberta.

Hamilton said she was in shock after the incident. "The odds of that happening are so small so I'm pretty grateful to be alive," she said.

Long odds, indeed. "The chances of a meteorite big enough to penetrate a roof and hit a bed are about one [in] 100 billion per year," says Peter Brown, a professor and the Canada Research Chair in planetary small bodies.

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1045990641/meteorite-canada-british-columbia-bed

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