Meteorite crashes through roof in Germany after fiery light show

An extremely bright fireball burned through the twilight skies of north-western Europe on March 8. Read more at straitstimes.com.

This past weekend, people in Koblenz, Germany, might have found themselves asking an unusual question: Is my house insured against meteorite damage?

Around 6.55pm local time on March 8, an extremely bright fireball burned through the twilight skies of north-western Europe. Thousands of people in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Germany had no difficulty spotting the incandescent object as it moved rapidly toward the north-east.

The fireball was recorded in several places by AllSky7 – a network of 24-hour skygazing cameras established in 2018, operated by private citizens and designed to spot falling meteors. This allowed astronomers to quickly work out the trajectory of the object and ascertain where any of its fragments might have crash-landed.

That task was made much easier when news organisations reported that several buildings in the western German state of Rhineland-Palatinate had been damaged by mysterious debris that fell from the heavens. The roof of one house, in the town of Koblenz, appears to have been punctured by at least one larger meteorite – a shard that fell into the (fortunately unoccupied) bedroom below.

No deaths or injuries have been reported. So, aside from some unexpected home renovations, this fireball event is “really fantastic”, said Mr Juan Luis Cano, an aerospace engineer with the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Center.

Finding meteorites – which contain clues about the solar system’s chaotic past and puzzling present – normally takes days or weeks, with hunters needing to comb through acres of grassy fields, forests or deserts at a glacial pace.