The object that tore through the roof of a house in the New Jersey suburbs this week was an iron meteorite, perhaps billions of years old and maybe ripped from the belly of an asteroid, experts who examined it said yesterday.
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The meteorite now belongs to the family whose house it ended up in, said Lt. Robert Brightman of the Freehold Township Police Department, adding that they had asked not to be identified. The family has not yet given permission for physical testing of the meteorite, but from looking at it, Dr. Delaney and other experts were able to tell that the object it had been part of — perhaps an asteroid — cooled relatively fast.

It is magnetic, and reasonably dense, they determined. The leading edge — the one that faced forward as it traveled through the earth’s atmosphere — was much smoother, while the so-called trailing edge seemed to have caught pieces of molten metal. In fact, Mr. Delaney said, it seemed very similar to another meteorite fragment, the Ahnighito, now on display at the American Museum of Natural History.