Doorbell Camera Captures Rare Video of a Meteorite Crashing Into Earth For The First Time Ever
On the afternoon of July 25, 2024, Laura Kelly and her partner Joe Velaidum stepped out of their house in Prince Edward Island, Canada, to walk their dogs. While Kelly walked away further, Veladium stopped briefly to pick up a stray lash he noticed in the front yard. While walking their dogs, the couple wouldn’t have anticipated what happened next. Turns out that millions of years ago, a blazing rock hurtled from space, revolved around the Sun, and made its way towards Earth, crashing this afternoon in their yard. Thanks to their doorbell camera, some sounds of this crashing rock were captured in footage which was later shared on YouTube by Compass Media (@compassmedia2022).
The footage reveals a grey walkway outside the couple’s house, surrounded by dense trees, green bushes, and a grassy lawn. The scene also displayed an outdoor block and a white flowering pot attached to the corner of the lawn. In the first few seconds, there were sounds of something falling, smashing, or clanging hard on the ground. Within another few moments, the red flowers stemming out of the white flower pot quivered a little. Soon enough, clouds of grey dust were pluming from the location, where Velaidum had stood just a few moments ago. At times, the dust even blocked the view of the camera. So when Velaidum and Kelly returned home, they were stupefied to notice the sooty debris and shimmery fragments scattered all around.
“We had no idea what it was. And in retrospect, if I had stayed in that spot for just two minutes longer, I would have been hit by that meteorite." Velaidum told The National Post. “It sounded like a loud, crashing, gunshot bang,” he described to Canada’s CTV News. After the discovery, the couple approached Kelly’s father who guessed that the fragments belonged to some kind of a space rock. Using a vacuum and a powerful magnet, he collected some rocky fragments and took them to an expert for detailed examination.
Upon analysis of the fragments, Chris Herd, curator of the University of Alberta’s Meteorite Collection, confirmed that the rock was indeed a meteorite. Naming it “Charlottetown Meteorite,” he made a statement that this was an “ordinary chondrite with features that help to explain why it broke apart as it hit the ground.” Months after the lab analysis, the rocky fragments have been officially cataloged in a database of the Meteoritical Society.
The discovery, Herd told CTV News, was remarkable as it was the “first time we’ve ever had a recorded fall of a meteorite hitting the surface of the Earth with sound included.” Herd also told National Post that the meteorite probably came from the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. “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," he described. He added that when the rock first entered the Earth’s atmosphere, it was traveling at 50 times the speed of sound. But as it plummeted downwards, it dropped its speed, before finally grazing against the grassy lawn and going still.
According to CNN, Velaidum teaches a religious studies course at a local university where he discusses the vastness, meaning, and power of the wider universe. So naturally he looked at this episode with a spiritual perspective. He believes that this incident was a reminder that "the lives that we lead are just a small part of this celestial drama that’s so much bigger than we could possibly imagine,” he said, per PEOPLE. Adding to NPR, he reflected, "We think our lives are so important when we fill it up with our egos, and there are these cosmic events that just dwarf our little concerns. And this is a tiny little event when it comes down to it in the cosmic scheme of things, but it's such an eye-opener."