27 August 2004

Woman struck by meteorite

A British woman has apparently been struck by a meteorite.

Pauline Aguss, a 76 year old great-grandmother from Lowestoft, Suffolk, was hanging clothes to dry when she suddenly felt a sharp pain in her arm. According to the BBC version of the story, she looked at her arm and saw a gash several centimeters long. Her husband, Jack Aguss, found a metallic rock the size of a walnut nearby. Initial reports are that the features of the rock resemble those of a meteorite.

Some press reports claimed this is the first known incident in which a person has been struck by a meteorite. Not so.

Dr. Siobahn M. Morgan is Professor of Astronomy at University of Northern Iowa. Her web site and her Astronomy 2004 home page are worth a visit. Dr. Morgan has summarized several incidents in which people, houses and cars have been struck by meteorites in this segment from one of her courses:

Comets, Asteroids, Meteorites and Impacts

Dr. Siobahn M. Morgan

"Even within the last 100 years, people have had some near-misses with meteorites. In 1938 a woman in Illinois heard a sound in her garage and went out to find a meteorite sitting on top of her car. A few years later a woman in Alabama was hit by a ricocheting meteorite that gave her a really nasty bruise on her hip. In 1971 a house in Wethersfield, Connecticut was hit by a meteorite. Eleven years later, a house about one mile away was hit by another meteorite. One of the best recorded impacts was of an object that smashed through the trunk of a woman's 1980 Chevy Malibu. This happened in 1992. The woman was offered $69,000 for her wrecked car, which was a real bargain (since the car was 12 years old and rather run down). The meteorite that did the damage was 30 pounds. The path that this particular piece of space debris took was recorded by many observers in the eastern US, and one person filmed it (they were actually at a high school football game when they caught the images)."

Forrest M. Mims III