Scientists say a 53-kilogram rock that crashed through a Somerset County bedroom in 2024 is the most pristine CM1/2 meteorite ever recovered — and the first to show evidence of ancient briny water inside a primitive asteroid.

On July 16, 2024, a daytime fireball streaked across the New York metropolitan area at 32,000 miles per hour, producing a sonic boom over the city with observers in five states reporting sightings. Sixty observers called it in to the American Meteor Society. A doorbell camera in Wayne, New Jersey, and two AllSky7 network stations in Connecticut and Pennsylvania captured the trajectory. Newark Airport Doppler radar detected a cloud of falling pebbles stretching from Staten Island into New Jersey 2 to 16 minutes later — searchers never recovered any of them.

At the time, NASA assessed that the rock was too small to survive atmospheric entry and had likely vaporized completely. That assessment was wrong. At roughly 11:20 a.m., the owner of a home in Hillsborough, Somerset County, heard what he later described as an immense crash that shook the house. He found a hole in the master bedroom ceiling, black soot covering the bed and carpet, and a strong sulfur-like odor. "Good thing I didn't sleep in," he said.

Rather than touching the material barehanded, the homeowner donned disposable gloves, wrapped fragments in aluminum foil and stored them in glass jars. He and his partner later used tape to lift microscopic bits from the walls, bought a new vacuum cleaner to collect particles from the carpet and itemized every find. Their meticulous recovery drew the attention of researchers and preserved what scientists now call the most pristine CM1/2 meteorite ever recovered.

A new study in Science Advances, led by SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens and published July 15, reveals the Hillsborough meteorite contains amino acids and organic compounds formed inside its parent body during an early aqueous alteration phase; later brine chemistry may have added complexity in some clasts. The rock is a rare CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite — only the second observed fall of this type worldwide, after Kolang in Indonesia in 2020.

"These are primitive meteorites," said Peter Brown, a meteor physicist at Western University in Ontario who was not involved in the study. "They resemble the chemistry that made the planets."

The parent body was a roughly 115-pound (53 kg) asteroid that entered the atmosphere at 14.4 kilometers per second. Orbital calculations trace it to the inner asteroid belt, likely from the Erigone family — the same asteroid family that includes Donaldjohanson, photographed by NASA's Lucy spacecraft in 2025. About 200,000 years ago, a 53-kilogram piece broke away from a near-Earth asteroid and began its final trajectory toward New Jersey.

Sodium-rich veins in the meteorite's microscopic fractures show that late-stage, highly concentrated brines once flowed through the asteroid's subsurface — the first time scientists have identified such salts in a CM-type meteorite. NASA Goddard astrobiologist Danny Glavin called the amino acid complexity "one of the big surprises" of the analysis. The American Museum of Natural History in New York City now curates the fragments, which continue yielding data about the chemistry that may have seeded life on Earth.

Sources

• NASA Science Mission Directorate (July 16, 2026). "NASA Study of Pristine Meteorite Adds to Story of Ancient Asteroids."

• New York Times (July 15, 2026). "New Jersey Couple Aids Meteorite Discovery After it Crashes Through Their Roof."

• SETI Institute (July 15, 2026). "Alien World Chemistry Found Inside Meteorite."

Jenniskens, P. et al. (2026). "Meteor over New York City: Brines in a primitive CM asteroid." Science Advances, 12(29), eaea2105. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aea2105

• Meteoritical Bulletin, No. 115 (2026). Hillsborough (code 87290). Lunar and Planetary Institute / USRA.