Small Chunks Of Meteorite Found In California

Over the weekend, a giant fireball was seen in the California sky as a flaming meteor flew through the atmosphere and exploded. The meteor is said to have created a very loud boom early Sunday morning and the fireball was seen from Sacramento, California to Las Vegas and in parts of northern Nevada. The meteor is said to have exploded with the force about one-third that of the atomic bomb dropped on Japan during World War II.

This week a man in Lotus, California named Robert Ward discovered two pieces of the meteorite. The chunks each weighed about 10 grams. If you've ever watched the show called Meteorite Men, you know that the small chunks can be worth a fortune, especially if the fireball was witnessed by a lot of people. Those little chunks in the man's hand could be worth tens of thousands of dollars each.

This type of event is said to happen possibly one time per year around the world. The meteor being seen and heard by people on the West Coast and a chunk of it being found is very rare indeed. The original meteor is believed to have weight is much is 70,000 kg according to NASA scientists. The loud boom heard was apparently caused by the very high speed that the meteor had when it entered the Earth's upper atmosphere, creating a sonic boom. More pieces of meteor could be found in the same area.

[via Telegraph]