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Meteorite fall
Falling of meteors From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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A meteorite fall, also called an observed fall, is a meteorite collected after its fall from outer space, that was observed by people or automated devices. Any other meteorite is called a "find".[1][2] As of December 2025[update], the Meteoritical Bulletin Database listed 1,269 observed falls of approved meteorites, most of which have specimens in modern collections.[3]
Significance
Observed meteorite falls are important for several reasons: Material from observed falls has not been subjected to terrestrial weathering, making the find a better candidate for scientific study. Historically, observed falls were the most compelling evidence supporting the extraterrestrial origin of meteorites.[4] Furthermore, observed fall discoveries are a better representative sample of the types of meteorites which fall to Earth. For example, iron meteorites take much longer to weather and are easier to identify as unusual objects, as compared to other types. This may explain the increased proportion of iron meteorites among finds (6.7%), over that among observed falls (4.4%).[3] There is also detailed statistics on falls such as based on meteorite classification.
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Observation methods
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Automated devices
In April 1959 the metorite Příbram was the first meteorite whose trajectory was tracked by multiple cameras recording the associated fireball. The Ondřejov Observatory in the Czech Republic captured photos of the fireball using eleven widely spaced cameras. With the help of this stereo recording (through triangulation), Přibram's trajectory could be reconstructed quite accurately, aiding its recovery and also - for the very first time - enabling scientists to trace its pre-impact orbit back to the asteroid belt.
Eleven years later, the fireball from the Lost City meteorite, was recorded with four cameras from the Prairie Meteorite Network operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, when it fell in Cherokee County Oklahoma, in January 1970.[5] This was the first time a meteorite was recovered solely on the basis of photographic measurements. In 1977 the meteorite of Innisfree was discovered using photographs taken by the Meteorite Observation and Recovery Program of the National Research Council of Canada.[6][7] The fall of Benešov was recorded in 1991, however the meteorite was only recovered in 2011 after the strewnfield was recalculated and metal detectors were used to search for small fragments.[8]
The meteorite of Ischgl had been found in Austria in 1976 and was kept at home by the finder without undergoing any scientific examination until 2008, when it was classified as a meteorite. Upon review of the archived fireballs events photographed by the German fireball camera network, it could be determined, in a study published in 2024, that in November 1970 a fireball event observed by 10 different stations was connected to the fall of the later discovered meteorite.[9]
Over the last decades fireball networks consisting of dedicated arrays of cameras were put in operation in several countries. As more automated cameras monitor the night sky and track fireballs, the chances of locating meteorites have increased. Statistics for observed falls by decade are listed in the table in this section. It took more than 30 years for the falls of the first 4 meteorites to be recorded by automated devices, the same amount of falls with documented trajectories as in the single year of 2015.
For the period since 2020 the number of meteorite falls reported globally each year has increased to on avererage more than 10 per year, up from about 6 a year in the 1990ies. As of December 2025 there are 75 instrumentally observed recovered meteorites, for which also a pre-impact orbit could be determined.[10][11][12][13]
Today, there are several networks of whole sky cameras recording space rock from different directions, thus making it easier to calculate the impact sites of meteorites and increasing the probability of actually finding material after a meteor has been observed.
Among the camera networks are:
Video cameras
Accidental random fireball records documented by video have increased over the past decades and social media now distributes videos so broadly that a much larger share of falls is being captured and documented.[14] The first ever meteor to be filmed by a camera was the Great Daylight Fireball which blazed over the Rocky Mountains in 1972 - however this earth grazer supposedly left earth’s atmosphere again, without meteorites impacting the ground.
The first meteorite fall to be documented by video cameras by coincidence was Peekskill meteorite in 1992.[15] The bright fireball visible for more than 40 seconds was recorded by 15 chance eyewitnesses’ videocameras from different locations. Peekskill back then was only the fourth meteorite whose prior orbit could be calculated based on the reconstructed trajectory of the fall. The orbits for the previous falls of Přibram (1959), Lost City meteorite (1970) and Innisfree (1977) had been determined based on photographs. Peekskill, however, was the first fall documented by motion-picture footage.
Video cameras have since become widespread with the rise of surveillance or traffic cameras, ski-resort webcams, dashboard and doorbell cameras and smart phones, which have all been used to capture fireballs in connection with recovered meteorites. Among the most spectacular falls observed by numerous cameras is the Chelyabinsk meteor from February 2013.[16]
The fall of the meteorite in Novo Mesto, Slovenia, in February 2020 was captured by dashcams, security cameras and even a camera mounted on a cyclist’s helmet. The footage was used by astronomers to triangulate the meteorite’s trajectory.[17][18][19]
The fall of the Charlottetown meteorite in 2024 was the first case, where the actual moment of the impact on the ground was recorded with video including audio.[20] The sound of the meteorite shattering upon impact has been described as similar to the sound of breaking ice.[21]
Astronomical observations before impact
In October 2008, the observation of asteroid 2008 TC3 turned into the first meteorite whose impact had been predicted. The asteroid on a collision course with Earth had been discovered by a telescope 20 hours before its entry into the atmosphere. The fall of the meteorite could be observed by pilots of a passenger plane from a distance of 1,400 km and a webcam recording in Egypt from a distance of 725 km as well as several witnesses on the ground near the “train station number six” (Arabic: al-Maḥaṭṭa Sitta) in the Nubian Desert in Sudan, who observed a meteor and heard explosion sounds minutes later. Months later an expedition searching for the meteorite turned up 10.5 kilograms of rock in some 600 fragments.
Since the observed fall of the Almahata Sitta meteorite, 10 more asteroids have been added to the list of predicted asteroid impacts on Earth which impacted Earth after discovery and orbit calculation that predicted the impact in advance.
Among them are 3 more observed falls, where fragments of the meteorites could be recovered:
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Historic records of meteors and meteorites
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Meteoric iron
Throughout recorded history, humans have observed meteor showers and fireballs in the sky and ocasionally documented these events. Since antiquity there are written records on sporadic meteors from Chinese[25], Korean[26], Babylonian[27], Greek[28] and Roman sources.[29] Due to the distinctive metallurgical properties Meteoric iron was used by cultures worldwide, even before the Iron Age – among them Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger, a bronze age arrowhead found in Switzerland and tools made from the Cape York meteorite by Inuit.[30][31][32]
Philological evidence
Philological evidence suggests that in several ancient cultures the word “iron” was used in connection with the sky, reflecting an awareness that rare iron masses could arrive as meteorites. In Mesopotamia the Sumerian term for iron was an-bar, meaning “fire from heaven” and the parallel Hittite term ku-an also conveys a celestial origin.[32] Egyptian terminology points the same way: The compound expression bia-en-pet that first appeared in the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt (13th century BCE) combines the terms for “thunderbolt” and “heaven” and in the meaning for “iron of the sky” was used for iron in general – suggesting an explicit recognition of meteoritic iron. Similar ideas appear in Semitic languages, where Hebrew parzil and Akkadian barzillu derive from barzu-ili “metal of god/of heaven” and the association persists into modern Georgian, where a meteorite is called tsis-natckhi “fragment of heaven”.[32]
Meteorite of Aegospotami
The meteorite of Aegospotami might be the earliest case of a meteorite fall, where in surviving literature an observed fall is directly linked to a recovered mass. Writing about this meteorite, the ancient greek natural philosopher Diogenes of Apollonia - living in the 5th century BCE - is also credited as the first author to argue meteorites have an extraterrestrial origin. According to writings recorded by doxographer Aetius he established:[33]
“In addition to the visible stars, invisible stones also wander through the heavens, having no name. They frequently fall on Earth and their fire gets extinguished, like the stony star which fell in flames at Aegospotami.”[34]
Ancient writers including Aristotle, Pliny the Elder and Plutarch reported that a large stone fell at Aegospotami on the Gallipoli Peninsula in the second year of the 78th Olympiad – corresponding to the year 466 BCE. The meteorite was described as brown in colour and the size of a wagon load and according to Plutarch was displayed and worshipped by the inhabitants of the Gallipoli Peninsula for several hundred years, until at least the first century AD.[35]
The object itself did not survive for modern study but the event - although unconfirmed - has been treated as plausible report of a meteorite fall.[36] The name of Diogenes of Apollonia lives on in the meteorite world, since Gustav Tschermak in 1885 proposed the name Diogenite for an abundant type of Achondrite “after Diogenes of Apollonia, who was the first to express clear ideas about the cosmic origin and the siderial nature of meteorites.”[37]
The fact that Diogenes’ hypothesis about the extraterrestrial origin of meteorites was not given further attention and it took more than two millennia for his solution to gain scientific acceptance is also due to Aristotle.[38] Aristotle about a century after Diogenes of Apollonia proposed a different account, treating the phenomenon as atmospheric; in his Meteorologica he discusses the Aegospotami stone in connection with a bright comet and suggests winds related to the comet carried the stone and dropped it later. In 2010 a computer model showed, that the comet described by Aristotle coincides with the retrodicted appearance of Halley's Comet in the summer of 466 BCE.[39][40]
Aristotle’s work - who also proposed that interplanetary space was devoid of solid matter - exerted a strong influence well beyond antiquity and his ideas were adopted by scholars in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. As a result, even in the 18th century most western scholars remained convinced that meteorites did not originate from outer space. Instead, they were often explained as stones thrown into the air by volcanic eruptions or lightning strikes and then falling back to the ground, or as products formed within the atmosphere through the action of lightning.
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Beginning of scientific meteorite research
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Around the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, a series of insights and publications, events and investigations laid the foundation for the scientific study of stones that fall from the sky. It was between 1794 and 1804 towards the ending Age of Enlightenment, when the debate shifted from anecdote and skepticism to treating meteorites as objects of empirical study, and meteoritics began to develop into a serious scientific discipline. Within ten years, four major scientific advances paved the way for broad acceptance. By 1804, most scholars accepted that meteorites are of extraterrestrial origin.[41]
Ernst Chladni’s book on the origin of iron masses
In April 1794, the German natural scientist Ernst Chladni published his book “On the Origin of the Pallas Iron and Other Similar Iron Masses, and on Some Associated Natural Phenomena”. With his book Chladni was the first in modern Western thought to publish the then audacious idea that meteorites are rocks from space, making the book a major turning point in the understanding of meteorites. Challenging the prevailing terrestrial explanations and the widespread skepticism of his time, he proposed a coherent hypothesis that linked reported falls of stones and irons to bright fireballs and argued that these objects originated in cosmic space rather than on earth.[42] By reframing “stones from the sky” as a legitimate natural phenomenon worth investigating, it helped kick-start modern meteoritics and paved the way for later acceptance through systematic studies and well-documented falls. Chladni is therefore sometimes considered as the father of meteoritics.[43]
After a conversation with Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who had witnessed a fireball in 1791, Ernst Chladni started searching the literature for eyewitness accounts of fireballs and rocks from the sky. He spent several weeks in the Göttingen State and University Library – which was considered one of the leading research libraries in Germany at the time – and studied reports of 18 observed meteorite falls from various countries and dating from antiquity to the 18th century.[44][45] Chladni compiled what he considered the most reliable eyewitness reports and the striking consistency among these accounts convinced him that the witnesses were describing a real physical phenomenon.[44]
The three most prominent records of observed falls studied by Chladni were the meteorites of Eichstädt (1785), Tabor (1753) and Hraschina (1751). For information on these three falls, Chladni quoted extensively from a paper “On Some Stones Allegedly Fallen from Heaven” published in 1790 by Austrian mineralogist Andreas Stütz. He compared them to the accounts of observed falls from Ensisheim (1492), Pleskowitz (1723), Nicorps (1750), Albareto (1766), Lucé (1768) and Aire-sur-la-Lys (1769). All of these meteorites are still considered observed falls today, allthough not all of these meteorites are still preserved.
Observation of falls and systematic field investigations
Meteorite of Siena
The publication of Chladnis book at Easter 1794 happened only six weeks before the well observed and documented meteorite fall of Siena in Italy. The Siena meteorite shower of 16 June 1794 was the first in modern times to occur in the vicinity of a major European city, which at the time had a population of nearly 30,000. Hence the meteorite fall was witnessed by so many people that its authenticity was difficult to dismiss. The observed fall sparked a lively controversy involving more than half a dozen scientists.
Meteorite of L'Aigle
A decisive turning point came with the meteorite fall of L'Aigle in France in 1803 and the documentation of this event by Jean-Baptiste Biot for the French scientific establishment; his systematic collection of testimony, mapping of the strewn field, and material comparisons helped convince much of the European scientific community that meteorites are real extraterrestrial falls.
Chemical analysis of meteorites
Another step forward into the future of meteoritics was the laboratory work of British chemist Edward Charles Howard and French mineralogist Jacques Louis, Comte de Bournon. They carried out analyses of samples of recently observed falls of Benares, Siena, Wold Cottage and Tabor together with samples from iron finds of Campo del Cielo, Krasnojarsk, Siratik and Steinbach. They published their results in 1801 and in an extended version in 1802 showing that - unlike ordinary terrestrial rocks - all the examined meteorites contained nickel, which is extremely rare in the Earth’s crust and therefore implying a distinct class of materials.
Discovery of asteroids
The telescopic discovery of the first asteroids Ceres by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801, Pallas by Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers in 1802 and Juno by Karl Ludwig Harding in 1804 revealed that the region between Mars and Jupiter contains small, planet-like bodies, from which rocky and metallic material could be delivered to Earth, providing a plausible extraterrestrial source for meteorites.
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List of meteorite falls
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Historic falls (861 – 1794)
The table below lists all 40 acknowledged meteorite falls, observed before April 1794 and is pre-sorted by date of fall. The table is based on the classification of the Meteoritical Bulletin Database maintained by the Meteoritical Society, however - unlike the meteorites of Nōgata, Ensisheim or Hraschina - not all are well-documented and only half of the listed meteorites are preserved to date.
Largest falls
While most confirmed falls involve masses between less than one kg to several kg, some reach 100 kg or more. A few have fragments that total even more than one metric ton. The six largest falls are listed below and five (except the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteorite) occurred during the 20th century. Presumably, events of such magnitude may happen a few times per century (often in remote areas) and have typically gone unreported.
For comparison, the largest finds (not corresponding to an observed fall) are the 60-ton Hoba meteorite, a 30.8-ton fragment (Gancedo) and a 28.8-ton fragment (El Chaco) of the Campo del Cielo, and a 30.9-ton fragment (Ahnighito) of the Cape York meteorite.
Recent falls (1959 – 2025)
As of December 2025, there have been 471 approved meteorites with observed falls found since the beginning of 1959. The year 1959 marks the beginning of the era of instrumentally observed meteorite falls, with the meteorite of Přibram being the first. Before that, meteorite falls could only be observed by human eyes (and ears).
Older falls (1794 – 1959)
This table lists all meteorites with observed falls since 1794 and before 1959. In April 1794 the German natural scientists Ernst Chladni published his book “On the Origin of the Pallas Iron and Other Similar Iron Masses, and on Some Associated Natural Phenomena”. This publication was a turning point in the understanding of meteorites because it argued – against the fashionable skepticism of the time – that the reported falls of stones and irons were real and that meteorites have their origin in cosmic space, linking them to bright fireballs. It was a groundbreaking work in many respects for the further development of scientific views since the late 18th century.
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See also
References
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