The cosmic rock hurtled through space and time and landed on Ruth Hamilton’s bed, right next to her head. It could be worth thousands.
At 11:35 pm on October 3, Ruth Hamilton was awakened by her dog’s urgent barking. The 66-year-old woman had been fast asleep at her home in the mountain city of Golden, BC, about 260 km west of Calgary. Then: a popping sound, as the ceiling in Hamilton’s room opened and the drywall covered his floral sheets. There was a huge hole the size of a soccer ball in its ceiling.
With one hand removing pillows from the bed and a 911 operator on the phone with the other, he spotted a foreign object sitting inches from where his head had been moments before. It was a charcoal gray rock the size of a grapefruit, cool to the touch and weighing just over a kilogram.
The RCMP officer who responded to Hamilton’s call that night suspected it was an explosion at a highway construction site not far from his home in the Rocky Mountains. It was only after the officer called the site that the rock’s extraterrestrial origin became clear. The crews told him that they had not made an explosion, but that they had seen an explosion in the sky and heard a large explosion. The Mountie returned minutes later and said to Hamilton: “I think you have a meteorite in your bed.”
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Hamilton, though unhurt, was shocked. The rock could have killed or seriously injured her if she had been sleeping a few inches further away in her queen-size bed. After a sleepless night peppered with tea and time watching The Crown, he reported the incident to the department of physics and astronomy at Western University in London, Ontario, and loaned them the rock for analysis. Philip McCausland, director of Western’s petrophysical and paleomagnetic laboratory, and Peter Brown, professor of physics and astronomy, confirmed that the rock was a meteorite. “As soon as I opened that email and saw the photos,” says McCausland, “there was no question.”
Space rocks collide with this planet about 41 times a month. But the chance of one hitting your house is around one in 100 billion. The explosion heard by the construction workers, and Toby, Hamilton’s frenzied dog, was the rock that shattered as it plunged into Earth’s atmosphere, moments before the fragment plunged into his room at a speed of 100 to 200 meters per second. As meteors enter the upper atmosphere, the air in front of them compresses and heats up, causing most to incinerate. To enchanted onlookers on Earth, they appear as balls of fire.
McCausland identified the rock as an ordinary chondrite. Although this type of meteorite represents between 70 and 80 percent of those that hit the Earth, they fascinate researchers like him: “It came a long time,” he says, “when the solar system was just beginning.”
Chondrites are packed with chondrules, which look like glass marbles, but are actually condensed, molten dust that floated around the sun 4.5 billion years ago. McCausland’s unproven suspicion: This meteorite came from a collision in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars about 470 million years ago. Meteorites are “intrinsically useful,” he says. “They give us a window into the history of the solar system that we don’t get from Earth.”
Using video captured by ground-based observers, including, in this case, footage from a home security camera in Calgary, the researchers can reconstruct the meteor’s orbit prior to its impact. From its trajectory, they discerned where it was coming from in the asteroid belt. Brown and McCausland are working on a paper to present these findings.
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Weeks later, the hole in the ceiling of Hamilton’s room was repaired: “Insurance covers it,” she says, and the meteorite returned from its science mission to Western. Hamilton plans to sell it. Under Canada’s Cultural Property Import and Export Act, meteorites belong to the owner of the property on which they fall, and cosmic rocks like yours cost between five cents and $ 1,000 a gram. “His [worth] what someone is willing to pay for a stone that has a very, very good backstory, ”says Michael Mazur, a Western Ph.D. astronomy student. Mazur traveled to BC to retrieve the Hamilton meteorite and personally delivered it to him in December.
Although Hamilton had a potentially lucrative near-death experience, it is thoughtful. “Cherish life and appreciate what you have,” she says. “I was curled up in my bed, fast asleep. If it had moved more than six inches, it wouldn’t be here. “
This article appears in print in the February 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Through the Roof.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.
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