About 5cm in diameter, billions of years old, and having likely travelled 100-million miles — a meteorite fragment provisionally named the Nqweba Meteorite was introduced to an enthralled audience at Nelson Mandela University (NMU) on Tuesday.

The moment marked the culmination of a week of intense work by a collaborative team from NMU, Wits and Rhodes universities, who have been piecing together the events of Sunday August 25 when a strange blue light flashed across the sky and an unearthly booming noise shook communities from Mossel Bay to Addo...