A French woman is struck by a visible meteor while on her balcony

On July 6, a woman in the French town of Alsace was chatting with a friend on the balcony of her home when she was struck by a small object. Upon further inspection, the black and gray concrete appeared to be meteorite.

was the news first reported by Les Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace. According to The Weather ChannelThe object hit the woman in the ribs with enough force to leave a bruise.

If confirmed, it would be one of the extremely rare cases of a meteorite hitting a person –At least, one of the cases that The person lived to confirm that this happened. The most famous example was in 1954, when a woman in Alabama was hit by a meteorite that fell through her roof. He left a large bruise on her torso.

Quick vocabulary breakdown: Meteorites are pieces of space rocks and minerals that have landed on Earth. Meteorites are fallinga job Pieces of rocks and minerals. Asteroids are large pieces of rock and metal in space, which are often the source of Earth’s meteorites.

It is not uncommon for such materials to fall from space. In reality, A team of researchers estimated last year More than 5,000 tons of asteroid and cometary dust fall to Earth every year. The relatively unusual thing is that the material actually survived the fall; Most large blocks disintegrate when heated in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Earlier this year, a suspected meteorite crashed through the roof For a home in New Jersey. in 2021, A rare meteorite fell On a trail in the Cotswolds in England. And In 2013 – already ten years ago! – A meteorite fell in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, smashing windows and injuring hundreds, though no one was killed. The Chelyabinsk meteorite was the largest meteorite to fall to Earth this century.

Falling meteorites can be billions of years old – that is, they date back to the formation of the solar system – and therefore can be of scientific value, besides the external value they have when They are sometimes auctioned off.

Even rarer is that of all the places on earth where a meteor can land, it hits a human. In 2020, researchers are filling in Documents found in the archives of Ottoman Kurdistan indicate that a meteorite fell that paralyzed one person and killed another in 1888.

As reported by Atlas Obscura At the time, those events “predate the famous massive Tunguska eruption of 1908, which may have killed two people, and are based on more evidence than a 1677 manuscript from Italy – which NASA cites– in which an Italian monk was killed by a stone “thrown from the clouds.”

Everything should be going absolutely fine until you hit a rock from space. But counterpoint: This woman in Alsace now has a bragging rights that no one else on Earth has (pending confirmation that the object is a meteorite rather than something ordinary).

If I knew it would only cost me a bruise, I would hit you with a meteorite any day.

More:Meteorite that crashed in Michigan contains ‘pure’ organic compounds