When your name is Comette, you might get used to jokes about rockets and space and planets. However, French schoolboy Hugo Comette, 11, had the last laugh when of all the places on Earth, a piece of rock from outer space landed on his home.
An egg-sized meteorite believed to be 4.57 billion years old smashed through the roof of the Comette family home on the outskirts of Paris some time over the summer when everyone was away on holiday.
The rock, blackened by its journey through Earth’s atmosphere, remained buried in the roof insulation, until Hugo’s mother, civil servant Martine Comette, 32, noticed the roof was leaking and called out someone to fix it.
‘FROM THE SKY’
The roofer took one look at the broken tile and told the Comettes that whatever had smashed their roof tile must have come from the sky.
“It would have had to be superman to break a tile in this way,” he said.
It was only then that the meteorite, weighing 88g, was discovered.
Curious to know exactly what it was, Martine Comette called out scientist Alain Carion, a mineral expert, who said it an “exceptional” discovery.
“It’s extremely rare. We have had only 50 or so meteorite falls in France over four centuries,” Carion told journalists. “We have never found anything like it within an 80km radius of Paris before.”
LONG JOURNEY
He said the Comettes’ meteorite was a piece of chondrite that had come from the belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Most meteorites recovered on Earth are chondrites, formed when particles present in the early solar system created primitive asteroids.
Some meteorites sell for up to US$1,350 a gram, but the Comettes will not be selling theirs.
“A piece of the history of space ... has fallen on us,” Martine Comette told Le Parisien newspaper. “It’s like a fairytale and less likely than winning the lottery, we’re told.”
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