At 11:17 a.m. on July 16, 2024, an asteroid sped through the sky over New York City. Sightings of the fireball — and reports of the thunder-like sonic boom it left in its wake — came from as far away as Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania.

But no one reported any part crashing to the ground. At the time, NASA said the rock responsible for the rampage, estimated to be about 30 centimeters long, was so small that it was “unable to survive until reaching the ground.” It was believed that during its fiery fall through the Earth’s atmosphere it would have been completely vaporized.

The owners of a home in Hillsborough, New Jersey, would have strongly disagreed. At 11:20 am that same day, a man working in his home office was rudely interrupted. “I heard an immense roar and felt like the house was shaking,” he said. It was as if all the cabinets in her kitchen had suddenly fallen off the walls.

After regaining his composure, he headed to the main room. “I open the door and see a hole in the ceiling above my bed,” he said.

The air smelled of rotten, sulfurous eggs, and was mixed with fine dust. There seemed to be black soot on every horizontal and vertical surface. When the man looked at his pillow, he saw several onyx-colored rocks.

“Thank goodness I didn’t fall asleep,” he said. (The owners requested anonymity to avoid revealing the precise location of their home.)

Before reaching Earth, the asteroid had a mass of 53 kilograms (which was calculated based on the brightness of the fireball, the speed of the object, and the sonic boom). Most of the object was vaporized as it accelerated through the atmosphere at 52,000 kilometers per hour. But a sizable fragment completed its journey to New Jersey, and the owners spent weeks carefully collecting about 1.4 kilograms of extraterrestrial material.

Although they shared their findings with scientists, the couple kept their discovery a secret from the public for two long years.

Now, a new study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances reveals that the space rock is no ordinary specimen. It contains complex organic molecules and fascinating evidence of salt water – ingredients that fuel life as we know it. Asteroids very similar to the Hillsborough sample may have contributed the same crucial compounds to a newly formed Earth billions of years ago.

“That makes this meteorite very special,” said Peter Jenniskens, a planetary astronomer and meteorologist at the SETI Institute in California, and one of the authors of the new study.

This type of meteorite is also quite fragile and prone to environmental contamination. That much of it was preserved in an almost pristine manner was due to the diligence and agility of the two owners. “They had secured the crime scene, so to speak,” Jenniskens said.

Thanks to their efforts, the scientific community has a remarkable and unusual relic from the Solar System’s past that causes wonder. “It’s what we always dreamed of,” said Ashley King, a meteorologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the new study.

When the homeowner first came across the hole in his roof, he and his partner couldn’t figure out what had caused it. An animal? Something fallen from a plane? But after hearing the news about the fireball and sonic boom, they realized that the disaster in their room could have originated in space.

First they called the police and then the firefighters. Both politely refused to help.

While researching meteorite falls on the Internet, one of the owners came across Mike Hankey, an amateur astronomer with the American Meteor Society and co-author of the new study, who had sighted the 2024 meteor using his AllSky7 network of camera stations to search for fireballs. The couple contacted him by email and then spoke by phone the next day.

Hankey was elated and offered the bewildered couple his congratulations. From the owners’ brief description of the debris, he learned that a peculiar type of meteorite had crashed into the room, one that was valuable both scientifically and economically. “At least $100,000 just came through your roof,” he recalled telling the owners. “They have to take good care of it. Every particle of dust they find is worth something.”

Aside from their immediate family, the owners refrained from telling anyone about their celestial visitor. Trusting Hankey’s advice, the owners extracted every speck of meteor dust they could find and sealed the samples in glass containers to keep them dry. They used duct tape to peel off microscopic bits from the walls and bought a new vacuum cleaner just to suck the cosmic particles out of the carpet. Each find was catalogued, labeled and preserved.

“We were extremely meticulous,” said one of the owners. “The only thing we were missing were hazmat suits.”

Scientists determined that the meteorite was a specific type of space rock called a CM chondrite. “These are primitive meteorites,” said Peter Brown, a meteor physicist at Western University in Ontario who was not involved in the new study. “They look like the chemistry that formed the planets.”

Meteorite hunters had collected several hundred CM chondrites over the last century or so, but many were found long after they landed. That meant they had been exposed to Earth’s elements, leaving them in a somewhat degraded state. The few that had been recovered immediately, like the Hillsborough meteorite, retained much of their ancient chemistry.

In addition to containing prebiotic chemical compounds, the meteorite shows intriguing signs of mineral alteration by salt water. Something similar was identified in rock samples taken directly from the asteroids Ryugu and Bennu—by robotic space missions operated by Japan’s space agency and NASA, respectively—in recent years.

This suggests that the Hillsborough meteorite came from a larger object that, at some stage, had water flowing inside it. “It’s cool; it’s really exciting,” King said.

The study’s authors believe that, based on its composition, the trajectory of its fall, and the timing of its exposure to solar and cosmic radiation as it ventured through space, the meteorite first formed part of a huge asteroid called 163 Erigone, which formed in the cold shadows beyond Jupiter. About 155 million years ago, another massive object collided with it, creating a new family of asteroids. This includes the peanut-shaped asteroid named Donaldjohanson, one that NASA’s Lucy spacecraft photographed in 2025.

Then, 6 million years ago, a member of this asteroid family collided with another asteroid, causing it to fracture into several smaller rocks. One escaped from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and began flying near Earth. Then, about 200,000 years ago, a 53-kilogram piece broke off. His odyssey ended when he crashed through a roof in New Jersey.

That part of that piece reached the surface of the planet was miraculous. This specific type of meteorite is “like a compacted ball of mud,” Hankey said. Weather radar data suggests that pebble-sized pieces fell over a large area between Staten Island and Hillsborough, but none were found during several weeks of searching, in part because rain had most likely turned them into a slushy sludge.

Considering the circumstances, it was a lucky chance that a large fragment landed inside someone’s room. “If this had landed in a wooded area, there’s a good chance it would never have been found,” Brown said.

Aside from the modest repair costs involved, New Jersey residents still can’t believe their luck. In a cosmic twist of fate, they had purchased the house just months before their rocky visitor arrived.

“We closed on the house in January 2024,” said one of the owners. “And in July we had a new tenant.”