On 26 May 1751, around 6 in the evening, a meteorite fell in the village of Domovec near Hrashchina, in Croatia's Zagorje region. Today, 275 years later, the Croatian Natural History Museum marks it as a pivotal moment in the history of science - and that is not an exaggeration. It was the first time in history that an official document was compiled with eyewitness statements about a body falling from space onto Earth.

It sounds small. But in the context of the 18th century, it had revolutionary significance. Many scientists at the time did not believe that materials from space could reach the ground - the idea of stones falling from the sky looked like village superstition. The Hrashchina meteorite took those doubts out of science and put them into the documents.

A piece of the meteorite is still preserved in the museum's collection. The meteorite is composed of iron with a high percentage of nickel. The researcher Alois von Widmanstätten analysed the crystal structures in it - structures that today carry his name (Widmanstätten patterns). Later, Neumann lines were also discovered - traces of intense collisions in the asteroid belt.

What does this mean for readers who are not scientists? That every meteorite is a piece of the Solar System's history - older than the planet we live on. When you analyse iron from a meteorite, you are looking at matter that was created before Earth, in stars that exploded billions of years ago. The piece in Zagreb is not „a strange stone". It is a witness to cosmic events.

The museum will hold a free public lecture on Tuesday at 6 in the evening, titled „Geological evidence for the asteroid impact that ended the era of the dinosaurs". Presenter: Zvonimir Drvar, senior curator at the „Nikola Tesla" Technical Museum. When you have the chance to listen for 60 minutes about cosmic impacts that changed the course of life on Earth - this is not an event to miss.