Rock
© SidewaysJosh Chapple found a 6cm meteorite in the back garden.
It's been quite a summer for things dropping out of the sky. In June, German teenager Gerrit Blank was struck by a pea-sized meteorite on his way to school in Essen: the projectile glanced off his hand and then left a foot-wide crater in the road next to him.

In the same month, reports reached us of a woman in Loughborough left amazed by a football-sized chunk of ice dropping from the heavens and slamming into her Renault. In July, David Gammon was enjoying lunch in his garden in Bristol when a 2kg block of ice fell into his lap, presumably from an aeroplane.

However, this week six-year-old Josh Chapple went one better by finding a 6cm meteorite in the back garden of his family home in Bratton Fleming, near Barnstaple, Devon.

The morning after the Perseid meteor shower - hailed as a washout by many observers due to overcast viewing conditions - Josh went to collect eggs from the hens kept in the garden of his farmhouse home. What he found was a lump of rock, black and with crystalline facets on its surface, covered in "burn marks".

His parents were skeptical at first but then realized that the rock was not, as they originally thought, made of coal: further research indicated that it was most likely to be interstellar in origin.