Each year, about 20,000 people live in Nördlingen, a town in southern Germany, without realizing they are living inside the crater of a cosmic impact that happened 14.8 million years ago. The town continues its peaceful life, largely unaware of the celestial event that shaped the ground beneath its streets. Beneath cobblestones, half-timbered houses, and the Saint George's Church lies a geological story of a violent collision between Earth and an object from space. The cosmic origin of the Nördlinger Ries crater was not discovered until 1960, when shocked quartz was found in the walls of a local church. The Saint George's Church in Nördlingen was built using suevite, a rock formed from the impact, which contains millions of microscopic diamonds. About 14.8 million years ago, an asteroid with a diameter of about 1.6 kilometers struck what is now the Swabian-Franconian Alb in southern Germany, moving at a speed of at least 20 kilometers per second. The impact created a basin 25 kilometers in diameter, known today as the Nördlinger Ries. The city of Nördlingen is located within this geological scar, though most of its inhabitants are unaware of this fact. For decades, scientists believed the crater was formed by volcanic activity, but this theory was challenged in 1960 by the discovery of shocked quartz by researchers Eugene Shoemaker and Edward Chao. The impact released an estimated energy equivalent to 120,000 megatons of TNT, causing an earthquake with a magnitude of 8.0. The explosion formed a crater 500 meters deep and triggered fires within a 100-kilometer radius, destroying all life in that area. The entire event, from the asteroid entering the atmosphere to the formation of the crater, occurred in about ten minutes. The immense heat and pressure from the impact created suevite, a rock containing microscopic diamonds. Medieval builders used this suevite to construct the Saint George's Church, meaning visitors to the church are surrounded by stones containing fragments of diamonds formed in the cosmic explosion. A lake formed in the crater shortly after the impact, but it dried up approximately two million years later, leaving behind sandy clay sediments that now make up the region's soil. Nördlingen, founded in the 9th century and granted city rights in 1215, has fortified walls dating back to 1327. Approximately 40 kilometers southwest of Nördlingen is the Steinheim crater, smaller with a diameter of 3.8 kilometers. A study published in 2020 suggested that the Steinheim crater formed about 500,000 years after the Nördlinger Ries, challenging the idea that both were formed by a binary asteroid impact.