Meteorite left a mark on the rice field

The peasants of one of the Indian villages in the morning found on the rice field “autograph” of a meteorite.

The fall of a cosmic stone about the size of a soccer ball fell on an ideal time for everyone: no one worked on the field at that moment. It happened near the village of Mahadeva in the state of Bihar. Now the stone is on display at the State Museum.

Every day about 100 tons of stones from space fall on our planet. True, most of them are difficult to call stones – rather, grains of sand or even dust. Larger meteorites are very rare. Say, an asteroid the size of a car flies through the Earth’s atmosphere about once a year – and it burns almost completely. And really huge space boulders, with a diameter of about a hundred meters, threaten us once every 2,000 years.

Residents of Mahadev proudly demonstrate to visiting journalists the trail from the fall of the stone. Still, when there will be so many guests in the village. As for the stone itself, it will soon be taken up by scientists from the Srikrishna Science Center. Astrophysicists want to study the composition of the stone, and to understand whether this is really a meteorite, or just someone’s mystification.