University of Alberta confirms meteorite landed on PEI home

It was a quiet July morning in Prince Edward Island when a space rock disrupted the peace.

What’s now been determined was a meteorite landed just outside a home in Charlottetown – where one of the homeowners was standing just two minutes earlier.

It left behind a smouldering two-centimetre divot.

Looking to confirm what landed just outside their door, the owners called in experts 4,700 kilometres away — in Alberta.

By chance, the University of Alberta’s Chris Herd was going to PEI anyway on a family vacation and couldn’t miss the opportunity of going to the scene to investigate himself.

“Standing in the homeowner’s kitchen using their kitchen scale to weigh out the materials and see how much stuff was collected,” Herd recalled.

Herd took fragments back to his lab in Alberta and determined it was indeed a meteorite. Now known as the Charlottetown Meteorite, it is what scientists describe as an ordinary chondrite.

It is the first recorded meteorite from the province of PEI and in the Maritimes.

The meteorite likely came from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It possibly travelled years at the right speed and trajectory to land on PEI.

Herd says meteorites often have elements that are natural to earth – this one contains nickel and iron.

“It’s just pulverized,” Herd told CityNews.

“There’s one flake in the middle you can see, that’s a piece where the fusion crust is preserved that would have been on the very outside of the rock.”

The research continues for Herd and his team, including learning more about the rock and how big it was before it hurtled through the atmosphere.

Correction: A previous version of this article indicated the asteroid could have travelled light years before landing on Earth.