A meteorite punched through a bedroom ceiling in Hillsborough, New Jersey, in 2024. Scientists have now found hundreds of different amino acids inside it — and the majority are not known to occur naturally on Earth.

A meteorite punched through a bedroom ceiling in Hillsborough, New Jersey, in 2024. Scientists have now found hundreds of different amino acids inside it — and the majority are not known to occur naturally on Earth.

On 16 July 2024, a daytime fireball crossed the sky near New York City, generated a sonic boom, and sent at least one surviving fragment into a house in Hillsborough, New Jersey. The recovered rock did not land in a desert search field or on Antarctic ice. It came through a roof, punched into a bedroom, and scattered dark fragments and dust across an ordinary domestic room. That would normally be a contamination problem before it became a scienc…