Boy Gets Hit By Meteorite

Posted by on Jun 14th, 2009 and filed under Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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Here is an interesting story about a 14 year old boy in Germany that got hit by a pea sized meteorite. Interestingly enough, they cropped out his hands in the pictures . . .

Gerrit Blank, 14, was on his way to school when he saw “ball of light” heading straight towards him from the sky.

A red hot, pea-sized piece of rock then hit his hand before bouncing off and causing a foot wide crater in the ground.

The teenager survived the strike, the chances of which are just 1 in a million – but with a nasty three-inch long scar on his hand.

He said: “At first I just saw a large ball of light, and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand.

“Then a split second after that there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder.”

“The noise that came after the flash of light was so loud that my ears were ringing for hours afterwards.

“When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road,” he explained.

Scientists are now studying the pea-sized meteorite which crashed to Earth in Essen, Germany.

“I am really keen on science and my teachers discovered that the fragment is really magnetic,” said Gerrit.

Chemical tests on the rock have proved it had fallen from space.

Ansgar Kortem, director of Germany’s Walter Hohmann Observatory, said: “It’s a real meteorite, therefore it is very valuable to collectors and scientists.

“Most don’t actually make it to ground level because they evaporate in the atmosphere. Of those that do get through, about six out of every seven of them land in water,” he added.

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