Erin Murphy / NBC Bay Area
A 2-inch meteor fragment landed in the yard of a Novato, Calif., resident after a meteor streaked through the sky on Wednesday evening.
By Lori Preuitt, NBCBayArea.com
A chunk of meteorite struck the house of a San Francisco Bay Area resident, landing in her backyard, after a meteor streaked through the sky on Wednesday evening.
Lisa Webber found the 2-inch rock, weighing 63 grams, in her backyard on Saturday after reading an article in the local paper about the meteorite.
She remembered hearing a strange noise on Wednesday, but thought that it was an animal, SFGate.com reported. After finding the chunk on Saturday, along with a dent on her roof, she and a neighbor?s son put a magnet to the rock and the two stuck together.
?It's just science -- and it's cool," Webber, of Novato, Calif. told?SFGate.com. "It's wonderful. It's like the heavens coming down, and history and this thing probably came from an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter -- I mean, how cool is that?"
Investigators at the non-profit SETI Institute inspected Webber?s find and declared it authentic.
NBCBayArea.com: Wednesday's meteor falls on North Bay home
"The significance of this find is that we can now hope to use our fireball trajectory to trace this type of meteorite back to its origins in the asteroid belt," said Dr. Peter Jenniskens, a SETI Institute investigator.
Jenniskens and his crew believe that larger pieces of the meteor are out there and hope to find others.?
NBC News staff contributed to this report.
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Source: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/22/14613399-meteor-chunk-falls-on-calif-home?lite
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