It’s been more than two months since a fireball was seen streaking across the sky in Alberta and B.C. on Sept. 4 and now scientists have tracked down “meteorite remains.”
Experts at the University of Calgary said the fragment is one-metre-wide and weighs one to five tonnes.
The incredible discovery comes after a professor at the university put out a call for video of the brilliant meteor on Sept. 13, in the hopes he’d be able to track its trajectory.
His team did just that. They narrowed the landing area to a 20-kilometre stretch starting east of Crawford Bay, B.C., to just north of Riondel, B.C., on the eastern shore of Kootenay Lake.
WATCH BELOW: Fireball over B.C.
“At first I couldn’t believe it,” said Fabio Ciceri, a visiting Masters student from the University of Milan. “It was like a dream to hold a space rock in my hand.”
Geoscience professor Alan Hildebrand said his team plans to continue searching for more fragments of the space rock but that winter weather has made “finding meteorites more challenging.”
“We need to recover more and larger meteorites to learn what we can from this fall,” he said.
Hildebrand suggested there could be thousands of meteorites in the area and that people nearby may be recovering fragments for years to come.
The U of C researchers are asking anyone who may have a security camera or wildlife camera in the area to check their footage for signs of the fireball.
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