What happened
On the evening of January 30, 1868, at around 7 p.m., residents of Mazovia saw a blindingly bright fireball in the sky, followed by powerful detonations. A hail of stones fell over an area of about 127 km² around Pułtusk, some 60 km northeast of Warsaw – onto frozen fields, ice, and the roofs of houses. Most of the fragments weighed only a few grams and were dubbed “Pułtusk peas,” but the largest specimen weighed more than 9 kg. An estimated 68,000 fragments fell, with a total mass of nearly 9 tons. The stones were gathered by local residents and bought by collectors and museums, and specimens of the Pułtusk meteorite ended up in collections around the world.
Witnesses
Thousands of residents of Mazovia who saw the fireball and heard the detonations; the fragments were collected by the local population.
Explanations and hypotheses
The phenomenon is fully explained: a fragment of an asteroid entered the atmosphere and broke up into thousands of pieces. The Pułtusk meteorite is an H5 ordinary chondrite – a rock dating from the early period of the Solar System. In terms of the number of fragments, it is the largest known shower of stony meteorites in history.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
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