There’s a lot of buzz going around the internet lately about the mysterious death of a man on a college campus in India that left three others in close proximity with injuries. The death was accompanied by a loud explosion that shattered windows on nearby buildings, and as you can imagine, authorities are trying to figure out just what happened.
The explosion left a small crater in the ground a few feet deep and a few feet wide, and the first assumptions are that some kind of explosive must have been detonated, but crime scene investigators did not find any remnants of bomb materials that would have been present if a bomb had gone off.
After discovering what appeared to be “rare” stone samples at the crater, some scientists now believe that this could be the first documented case of a human death by meteorite in human history.
“We can rule out the possibility of any terror angle or sabotage. Not a single ingredient pertaining to any kind of explosive was found at the site. We suspect it to be a meteorite fall,” a top police official told The Hindu on Saturday.
Local scientists are examining the stones to see if there is any evidence that can prove the stones may be from outer space.
“The scientist was camping nearby and rushed to the college soon after hearing the news of the blast. We are convinced that it is a meteorite that fell with high velocity. In the earlier incident, local people remember having seen an object falling from the sky in the field,” the official said.
Many space rock experts, including some who work closely with NASA, suggest that the crater is unlike any that are typically seen with meteorite impacts and that the death was unlikely to be related to any kind of meteorite falling from the sky.
Scenarios like this are very rare and there are no documented cases of a meteorite ever striking a human being and killing them. Scientists still aren’t exactly sure what the cause of death was, or the cause of the explosion, but investigation continues.
Slightly unrelated, but speaking of space rocks, an asteroid is expected to pass Earth as close as just 11,000 miles away on March 5th, so keep those eyes peeled.
Source: The Hindu
