ATHENS, Ga. – A meteorite that streaked across the sky of the Southeast and ended up crashing into a Georgia home has now been studied by researchers at the University of Georgia.

The space debris, now known as the "McDonough Meteorite," crashed through Earth’s atmosphere on June 26, creating a large fireball before damaging a home outside of Atlanta .

Scott Harris, a planetary geologist and impact expert with UGA’s Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, examined fragments that were recovered from the scene and traced their composition to around 4.5 billion years ago – long before the formation of Earth.

"It belongs to a group of asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter that we now think we can tie to a breakup of a much larger asteroid about 470 million years ago,"

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