'Meteorite' lands in Shrewsbury back garden
Rocks believed to be from a meteorite shower landed in the back garden of a Shropshire home, just inches away from where two young children were playing.
Mum-of-two Sarah Marston-Jones, of Copthorne, in Shrewsbury, says she and her children are lucky to be alive after more than 15 rock fragments landed as the youngsters played on a trampoline.
Mrs Marston-Jones, a schoolteacher, said Harry, aged two, and Benjamin, four, were enjoying the sunshine when all three of them heard a large "whooshing" and "cracking" sound through the hedges and trees before a strong burning smell filled the air.
She said the brown and black coloured rocks, which also showered down on the outside patio, ranged in size, but some were more than an inch wide.
Mrs Marston-Jones said the whole family was still in shock and the rocks, which fell at about 9.30am yesterday, must have missed her children by little more than inches as fragments were found underneath the trampoline.
She said: "I don't know if it was some sort of meteor shower or one fragment which cracked on impact but I turned around and took one step before hearing this whooshing and cracking sound coming through the hedge and tree and you could hear lots of dropping sounds on the patio.
"Benjamin was saying 'get me off the trampoline' and at first I thought a spring might have come off it but there was this really intense burning smell followed by a smell which I can only describe as rotten vegetables.
"I looked under my chair and there was a rock fragment about an inch and a half wide. We've now collected about 15 but haven't even checked the hedge yet so there could be more."
She added: "It took a good 30 seconds for it to sink in what was happening and I think we were in absolute shock by it.
"At the time it could have been quite dangerous and even killed one of our children – that's how close it was."
Dr Caroline Smith, curator of meteorites at the Natural History Museum in London, today said she could not be sure the rock fragments were from a meteorite after studying initial photographic evidence.
Update: Rock fragments may have been from underground explosion
A meteorite is a meteoroid – a solid piece of debris from such sources as asteroids or comets – originating in outer space that survives impact with the Earth's surface.
A meteorite's size can range from small to extremely large.
When a meteoroid enters the atmosphere, frictional pressure and chemical interactions with the atmospheric gases cause the body to heat up and emit light, forming a fireball, also known as a meteor or shooting/falling star.
A meteor was spotted in the skies over Shropshire in May.
Sightings were also reported in areas such as Cornwall, Hampshire, Lancashire, south Wales and Worcestershire.
And in February a meteorite injured about 1,000 people after breaking up over central Russia.
The space rock burned up over the city of Chelyabinsk, with the shockwave blowing out windows and rocking buildings.
Numerous videos of the fireball were taken with camera phones, CCTV and car-dashboard cameras and subsequently shared widely on the web.
