Meteorite fell in China

The video, taken on December 15, shows a meteorite illuminating the night sky and falling to earth in a fireball in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province. No injuries were reported.

The fireball visible on the surveillance video crossed the sky for just a few seconds and fell in the distance, burning up, with a brightness exceeding that of the full moon. Several unburned meteorite fragments were found in the village of Chengtou, Pujiang County, Jinhua.

A crater with a diameter of about 8 centimeters was later discovered on the concrete floor at the gate of a farmer's house in this village.

The meteorite found was 8 centimeters long and weighed 1.7 kilograms.

It is assumed that the meteorite was too large to burn at high altitude, so it entered the Earth's atmosphere and reached the surface in the form of debris after the explosion. Zhang Baolin, a senior meteorite expert at the Beijing Planetarium and a scientific expert at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told local media that the meteorite probably came from the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars.

Zheng Yongchun, deputy director of the expert studio for space science communications and a scientific expert, after examining the meteorite fragment, made a preliminary conclusion that the meteorite is 4.6 billion years old, which is older than all rocks on Earth.