Meteorite Crashes Through Roof of New Jersey Home

A "metallic object" believed to be a meteorite smashed into a house in New Jersey on Monday afternoon, according to local police.

The Hopewell Township Police Department said in a statement that the object was around 4 by 6 inches in size, and was found after it crashed through the roof of a home, coming to a halt on its floor. The house was occupied at the time of the collision, but no injuries were reported.

"We facilitated a meeting with an astrophysicist and the residents involved," Louis Vastola, an operations lieutenant at the Hopewell Township Police Department, told Newsweek. "The object will be tested at some point but based on the feedback we got from making various phone calls, it does appear that this is a meteorite at this time."

Meteors fall to Earth regularly in a variety of shapes and sizes, with hundreds hitting the ground each year.

"As it comes into Earth's atmosphere at high speed (above 12 kilometers [7.5 miles] per second), it pushes the air in front of it, causing that air to become superheated (kind of like a shockwave), which in turn causes the surface of the rock to 'ablate.' Basically, the very surface layer gets super-heated, and vaporized," Jonti Horner, an astrophysics professor at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, previously told Newsweek.

"As the thing continues to push through the atmosphere, it gets whittled away from the outside in by this ablation process—until friction with the atmosphere slows it to subsonic speeds," Horner said.

These rocks usually burn up completely as they fall to Earth, but occasionally, some survive the descent and crash down to the ground itself.

Annemarie E. Pickersgill, a meteorite-impact scientist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, told Newsweek in November: "When the original asteroid is very big, more than 50 to 100 meters (164 to 328 feet), it is likely to keep most of its speed and survive passage through the atmosphere."

It's possible that this meteor may have been associated with the Eta Aquariid meteor shower currently occurring, which peaked on May 6. These meteors are chunks of the famous Halley's comet, left behind in the comet's wake after some of its journeys centuries ago.

Vastola told Newsweek that "there is no safety risk for the family" following the meteorite strike and that the police department has ended its investigation into the incident.

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