A woman was left terrified after a "fireball" fell from the night sky and crash-landed in her garden.
Hundreds of locals in France spotted a bright object falling to Earth in the night between September 9 and 10.
The mystery object ultimately landed in the back garden in the Communauté de Communes Sauldre et Sologne, waking up the person who lived there who said she heard a loud noise.
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The next day, she went outside to investigate and found chunks of rock.
After reporting the discovery, a team from space research organisation FRIPON/Vigie-Ciel and the Astronomical Society of France (SAF) went to investigate and discovered the strange falling object was a meteorite.
"Immediately, we set off. And when we got there, we were immediately sure," SAF president Sylvain Bouley told local news outlet actu.fr.
"We had a beautiful fusion crust [of rock melted by entry into the atmosphere], the interior was very clear, there were shiny gravels inside which betrayed the presence of metal… All the characteristics of a meteorite."
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The team found the meteorite had splintered into three parts upon impact, weighing about 0.7kg in total – the size of a small guinea pig.
Meteors, made up of ice and rock, heat up as they hurtle towards the ground at high speeds.
Bouley reckons this one, though small, was travelling at several hundred miles per hour when it hit the Earth.
"Luckily she wasn't underneath," he said. "There was no crater, but it broke the table."
According to NASA, larger-than-average meteors create bright flashes of light as they whizz through the atmosphere, making them look like they're on fire.
Most of the meteor is vaporised during the fall – just five percent makes it to the Earth's surface.
And despite appearing to be ablaze, meteors are actually cold when they reach our planet.
"A meteorite like that coming through the atmosphere is a little bit like what you get when you order some deep-fried ice-cream," Jonti Horner, an astrophysics professor at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, previously told Newsweek.
"You have a lump of rock or metal that is moving through space and has been in space for billions of years. So it will be chilled through to its very centre – nice and cold."
The meteorite chunks found in the woman's garden are now being analysed at the National Museum of Natural History in France.
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