For the second time within a month, a meteorite has landed in Connecticut. A strange rock found in the yard of a house which a mineralogist confirmed to be a meteorite.
Jay Langlois of Red Maple Lane in Waterbury said that he didn’t hear or see the rock falling from the sky but saw his gutter broken. He then called Yale to check on a rock near the gutter.
Stefan Nicolescu, mineralogy collections manager at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, said that this new meteorite is possibly connected to the first meteorite found in Wolcott 19 days ago.
The Waterbury meteorite weighs 1.6 pounds and measures 4 inches long, 2 inches by 2.5 inches. When compared to the Wolcott meteorite, they discovered that is has exactly the same dark crust, magnetic level, and interior color. The museum will do further analysis to see if the two are indeed related to each other.
If they discover that the two meteorites are the effect of one incident, it may indicate a possibility that a single meteorite fall is capable of hitting more than one structure once it breaks down into pieces in our atmosphere. The distance is also predictable since the Waterbury and Wolcott meteorites were found 1.5 miles away from each other.
"It's not very often that this happens, that in one meteorite shower two or more buildings are hit at the same time," Dr. Nicolescu said. "These are rather rare occurrences so that's what actually makes this event so much more interesting than a regular meteorite find or a regular meteorite fall."
Yale is now investigating why the meteorite falls happen only in towns that begin with letter “W” in Connecticut except for one incident in 1974 that landed in Stratford. The first incident was in Weston in 1807, Wethersfield in 1971 and 1982, then Wolcott and Waterbury this year.
Another pattern observed is that the meteorite fall happens every 11 years and hit houses every 1.5 miles away from each other.
The Weston and Wethersfield meteorites are preserved and displayed at Peabody's hall of minerals, earth and space.
