Meteorite Confirmed by The College of New Jersey and Expert Consultant

The object that slammed through the roof of a Hopwell Township,New Jersey home has been confirmed to be a stony chondrite meteorite by physicists of The College of New Jersey and their expert consultant.That means it is a piece of an asteroid that formed in the early solar system.Tests performed included visual examination;scanning electron microscope images;density measurements;and an expert assessment by Jerry Delaney,a retired meteorite expert from Rutgers University and the American Museum of Natural History in New York.* The Associated Press reported that the Physics Department Chairman,Nathan Magee,said that: the object is a true chondrite meteorite,in excellent condition,and one of a very small number of similar witnessed chondrite falls known to science.* Indeed,the space rock was still warm when the Kop family found it in a bedroom.A stony chondrite meteorite is one which has not been modified by either melting or differentiation of the parent body.They are formed when various types of dust and small grains in the early solar system accrete to form primitive asteroids.Embedded in the dust are presolar grains which predate the formation of the solar system and came from elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy.The chondrules,or round grains,from which the meteorite gets its name were molten or partially molten droplets in space believed to have formed when a shock wave passed through the solar system,perhaps a shock wave from the gaseous disk that formed Jupiter,a recent study suggests.* These meteorites of asteroid origin date back more than 4.54 billion years.They are pieces of small to medium asteroids that were never part of a celestial object large enough to undergo melting and planetary differentiation.