Fire comets once rained on Earth, according to new evidence discovered by scientists from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, says CNET. It happened 28 million years ago, and devastated what is now Egypt in a "shockwave of fire."

The first concrete evidence of the phenomenon consists of chemical analyses of a black pebble that was found in Egypt. Discovered by an Egyptian geologist 'among the shards of silica left by the comet's blast,' the pebble had been determined to be the nucleus of the comet, making it the 'the first well-known hand specimen' of its kind on Earth. The pebble nucleus had been named "Hypatia," after the female philosopher and astronomer from Alexandria who earned her place in Mathematics as the first woman expert in the field.

Scientists explained that when the fire comets entered the Earth's atmosphere and struck Egypt, the blast heated the sandy terrain up to 2,000 degrees Celsius. As a result, the area turned into a 'sea of silica,' and became a popular site for study among geologists and scientists.

Interestingly enough, silica glass abundant in the area of collision had been found in ancient jewelry among Egyptian royalty, including a brooch reportedly worn by the Egyptian king, Tutankhamun, according to the Global Post.

The study is set to be published in the journal, "Earth and Planetary Science Letters," which covers the publication of discoveries and studies made by geoscientists, physicists, and astronomers from the University of Wits, the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation, and the University of Cape Town.

Lead author of the study Jan Kramers said that the study is ground-breaking in the sense that comet material need not be collected from space for study. He said, "NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) spend billions of dollars collecting a few micrograms of comet material and bringing it back to Earth, and now we've got a radical new approach of studying this material, without spending billions of dollars collecting it," reports Bloomberg. Most importantly though, it scientifically determines the fact that the Earth had indeed been struck by a comet millions of years ago.