An Albertan doing his spring cleaning found a strange rock in the gutter of his home that turned out to be a meteorite that had struck several months earlier.
The University of Alberta announced Friday that it had confirmed the first meteorite impact observed in the province in 45 years.
Last fall, Doug Olson witnessed a meteorite hit his home in Edmonton’s Mill Woods neighborhood.
“I was folding laundry when there was a loud bang on the roof. […]. I thought it must have been a meteorite, but I thought maybe it had bounced somewhere else in the neighborhood,” Olson said in a video posted online by the university.
In the spring, the man found a black rock in his gutter and made a connection to the sound he had heard the previous fall. So he decided to take the collected rock to Chris Herd, a meteorite expert at the University of Alberta’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
“We can see small metal fragments that are characteristic of this type of meteorite […] “It’s fun to look at the object and say, ‘Hey, that came from space just a year ago,'” Mr. Herd commented in the video, which shows a fragment of the meteorite stored in the museum’s collection.
Olson had an incredible stroke of luck. The last meteorite impact was observed in Alberta in 1977.
To date, only 18 meteorites have been found in the province and 67 in Canada.