It seems that a meteorite is not the cause of the mysterious hole in the roof of the Renault Clio car

The incident occurred on November 20, 2023, according to the French newspaper Le Figaro The collision caused a gap of about 50 centimeters in the roof of the Clio. What happened wasn’t clear at first: Firefighters were sent to Clio to investigate a “smoking car.” They quickly ruled out fire and sabotage, and after much thought, concluded that the crater was probably caused by a meteorite.

It wasn’t just the ceiling panel that was damaged. Whatever the cause of the puncture, the speed of the object was high enough to penetrate the floor of the hatchback and the fuel tank. Tests for radioactivity were negative, but nothing was found in the car. “Either it is so small that we cannot find it, or the impact was so strong that the object disintegrated and turned into dust,” Mathieu Colobert, leader of the fire team sent to the scene, told the French newspaper.

Shortly afterwards, officers found a “chestnut-shaped object” next to the car, which was examined by the University of Strasbourg’s Earth Sciences School and Observatory (EOST). “After initial observation using a magnifying glass, it was found that the 1.5 cm-sized rock did not show any meteorite characteristics,” EOST reported. “It did not have the right composition and was not provided with an atmospheric glaze.”

However, the rock has been analyzed in detail using a sophisticated electron microscope. This showed that the stone consisted of ground sandstone composed of multiple crystals of quartz and pyrite, among other things, covered by crystalline threads of hydrocarbons from bitumen or diesel. It is also not certain that the stone has anything to do with the hole in the ceiling.

The university confirms that it is very unlikely for a meteorite to collide with a car. “The chance of a given vehicle hitting a meteorite large enough to damage it is about one in a hundred billion per year. For most European countries, the chance is between one in a thousand and one in ten thousand.

According to the university, we should keep this data in mind before “simply” claiming that an unexplained event must have been caused by a meteorite. Since the invention of the automobile, there has only been one known case where a car actually hit a piece of space rock. It happened over thirty years ago in Bexhill, USA.

On the evening of October 9, 1992 A meteorite weighing more than two tons penetrated the atmosphere there. The light emitted was brighter than a full moon and explosions were heard as the meteorite disintegrated as it moved across the skies of the northeastern United States. The meteorite’s optical flight path extended more than 450 miles before a small portion of it — the only piece ever recovered — flew through the trunk of a parked car in Peekskill, New York.

In the absence of direct evidence, the university currently believes that the large hole in the ceiling was caused by a piece of ice that fell from a plane. This can happen when planes fly through clouds of ice crystals and explode, or from a chemical leak in the toilet on the plane. EOST has not concluded that this was the cause of the hole in Clio’s ceiling, but considers this hypothesis more plausible than that of the meteorite.

Falling ice blocks are more common. This happened two months ago in Loon op Zand, when A The block of ice landed on the shed. But even then, the chance of a car — or person — being hit is very small. The Snowfall Reporting Center receives a report on average twice a year. However, the reporting center is not aware of any incident in which someone has been struck by such a mass – let alone killed.