It’s like nothing you’ve heard before.
When Prince Edward Island resident Joe Velaidum and his wife, Laura Kelly, returned from walking their dogs on a Thursday afternoon last summer, they found a pile of dusty debris by their door. Checking the home’s security camera — which records sound as well as video — revealed that a rock had fallen from the sky, smacking into a low wall next to the driveway.
A plume of dust can be seen from the impact. And there’s a sound, like a cross between ice breaking and glass shattering; the sound of a meteorite hitting an object on the ground. It’s the first time in history such a noise has been recorded.
Velaidum says that not only did the security video capture the moment of impact; it also showed him standing in the exact same spot moments earlier, collecting the dogs’ leashes, which were on the lawn.
“I never stop in that spot,” he says. “And in retrospect, if I had stayed in that spot for just two minutes longer, I would have been hit by that meteorite, because it landed right at that spot.”
Velaidum says he and his wife were puzzled at first by the weird marks on the walkway when they got back. But her parents, who live nearby and came over to investigate the noise, had a theory.
“Laura’s dad said, ‘I think this is a meteor!’ And he’s kind of full of bluster so .. we were skeptical.”
But the video made a more definitive case. “Laura’s dad, once we thought it was a meteorite, he went and bought a very powerful magnet and collected all of the pieces that he could. So that was here waiting for Chris.”
That’s Chris Herd, the first hit you get if you Google “meteorite expert,” and whose voicemail contains detailed instructions on what to do if you think you’ve found a meteorite.
Herd is an expert on space rocks at the University of Alberta, but in a bizarre coincidence was due in P.E.I. that summer for a family holiday. Combining business with pleasure, he paid a visit to Velaidum and returned home with several vials of meteorite dust. The final analysis was completed just a few weeks ago.
Herd says the rock in question is what’s known as an “ordinary chondrite,” the most common type of meteorite, composed of iron and nickel (hence the magnet) and various other elements including silicon and oxygen.
“It comes from the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter,” he says. “So a fragment of an asteroid broke off at some point — it could have been millions of years ago — made its way around the sun and then crossed the Earth’s orbit, late afternoon Atlantic time, last July 25th.”
Herd says the rock might have weighed about a kilogram and would have been travelling at about 60,000 kph, or 50 times the speed of sound, when it plunged into the atmosphere. By the time it reached Velaidum’s home, some 90 per cent of its material would have ablated (burned away), and its speed would have been a more leisurely 200 kph. (You can see the rock in the air in two frames from the security footage.)
“It’s not as fast as a bullet, but 95 grams were recovered,” Herd says, guessing it was about the size of a kiwifruit before it shattered. “If that hit you going 200 kph that would definitely hurt, if not kill you.”
He’s intrigued by the shattering effect since other meteorites have been known to punch through the roof of a house before bouncing to a stop, relatively intact. Microscopic analysis of the remains showed fractures “that probably existed from before, probably from collisions in the asteroid belt,” he says. “And happening to hit the walkway instead of even the softer grass a metre away meant that it was just pulverized.”
He also noticed that the first debris collected by Velaidum and his family immediately after the meteorite landed differed from other samples collected a few days later. Even in such a short period of time, rust could be seen forming on the particles.
Herd is intrigued by the audio that was captured, though he admits: “I think it’s mostly really cool.” It is, as far as he knows, the only time a meteorite strike has been recorded with both video and sound. It’s also the first documented meteorite strike in the Maritimes.
“There may be other science to be done here,” he adds. “Somebody might have an idea … to figure out if the sounds that it made as it hit tell us anything about the object itself.” He says his wife thought it sounded “like breaking ice, like ice shattering, which I thought was a pretty good analogy. There’s a tinkling quality in there.”
Velaidum is an associate professor in the religious studies department at the University of Prince Edward Island. His web page at the university notes: “Over the past decade, I have increasingly become interested in the relationship between faith and reason, and am working on a multi-faceted project that tackles the question of the meaning of life.” So what does he make of this cosmic encounter?
“It has really significantly changed me,” he says. “Our lives, everything we do, is just filled with our egos. It’s about our wants, our desires, our concerns, and we think the universe revolves around us.”
He continues: “We all need to be reminded that the lives that we lead are a small part of this drama that’s so much bigger than us. We’re on this rock spinning around this burning star that’s unfathomably far away, and we’re just a fraction of this universe. And every once in a while this universe opens itself up and shows itself to us, and usually we ignore it.
“I ignore little things that happen all the time. This one I couldn’t ignore. It nearly killed me, right? It is preoccupying my time. It’s making me think about priorities as well.”
He says he asked others to weigh in with their interpretations. “It’s run the gamut from ‘It’s just dumb luck’ to ‘It’s not my time yet.’ But I don’t have words to explain how nuts it is.”