A very interesting story surfaced over the weekend. It was claimed that a man in India was killed by a meteorite strike on a college campus in Tamil Nadu, one of India’s southern states, local reports suggested that a large object fell from the sky and caused an explosion at the Bharathidasan Engineering College killing the man and also injuring three people.
It hasn’t really been confirmed so far if the object that reportedly fell from the sky actually came from space. Officials chalked it up as a meteorite strike when they couldn’t find any evidence of conventional explosives, reports the Chicago Tribune.
A team from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics is going to look at the debris from the scene to determine whether or not it really was a meteorite strike. The possibility exists that it might be something else or maybe some other kind of space debris.
If it turns out to be a rock that came straight from space then this would be the first recorded incident of a human actually dying due to a meteorite strike.
There have been meteor strikes in the past that have caused a significant amount of damage. In 2013, a meteor about 55 feet wide exploded over the Russian town of Chelyabinsk and ended up injuring some 1,000 people.