Scientists from Western University and NASA display some meteorites from other impacts during a press conference at the airport in St. Thomas, Ont., on March 21, 2014.Geoff Robins/The Canadian Press
Scientists are calling on people in Ontario’s Niagara region to keep an eye out for pieces of a meteorite that crashed down in the area this weekend.
Residents in the area between Toronto and Hamilton were able to see the meteorite lighting up the sky early on Saturday morning.
Peter Brown, a University of Western Ontario physicist, says the meteorite weighed about 500 kilograms and was less than a metre in diameter when it entered the Earth’s atmosphere around 3:25 a.m. on Saturday.
He says people living in the area between Toronto to Hamilton heard the sonic boom the meteorite caused as it was moving about 40 times the speed of sound before it broke up in the atmosphere.
Brown says his research group believes small pieces of the meteorite made it to the south shore of Lake Ontario, around Grimsby and Vineland, and larger pieces that could weigh several kilograms landed north of St. Catharines.
Kim Tait, a mineralogy, meteorite and gem curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, says a group of researchers surveyed the area looking for the space rocks over the weekend, but they couldn’t find anything due to the snowy weather.