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Meteorite Hits Girl
redcliffe writes "The BBC has a story about a 14 year old North Yorkshire girl who was hit, on the foot, by a meteorite. Where's Bruce Willis when you need him?" The young Miss Carlton notes: "This does not happen that often in Northallerton"; no doubt the City of York is where most meteorites land.
From the article: .Noticing it was "quite hot", she showed it to her father Niel.
The problem with this is that meteors are not hot. See this link and this one. From the first link:
Objects from space that enter Earth's atmosphere are -- like space itself -- very cold and they remain so even as they blaze a hot-looking trail toward the ground. "The outer layers are warmed by atmospheric friction, and little bits flake away as they descend," explains Yeomans. This is called ablation and it's a wonderful way to remove heat. (Some commercial heat shields use ablation to keep spacecraft cool when they re-enter Earth's atmosphere.) "Rocky asteroids are poor conductors of heat," Yeomans continued. "Their central regions remain cool even as the hot outer layers are ablated away."
And from the second:
Are asteroids hot or cold as they descend through Earth's atmosphere? (Level II, They are cold as they enter and remain so even as they blaze a hot-looking trail toward the ground. The outer layers are warmed by friction and little bits flake away as they descend.)
So I suppose it is part of abilated material if it is real, that would explain why it was hot. That would probably still make it a meteor. It might also explain why she still owns her foot.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
The article says the object was "quite hot"... Well if they knew anything, they should know that the majority of all meteorites that fall to earth are COLD to the touch when they hit earth, do to the fact that they are 'burning' so fast when they enter the atmosphere that the heat doesnt transfer to the core of the meteor. And the part about rust being on the rock doesnt really make sense (to me atleast)... When an object comes in from outter space, the outside is heated and melted away, and by the time the NEW outside is showing, it has usually melted and cooled within a few seconds of falling, giving it a melted glassy almost golf-ball look, how could rust form in a few seconds?? And the whole thing about it being from Mars and crap, these people are RETARDED!! The rock could be from ANYWHERE. Only a small fraction are from Mars, and there is no way they can tell just by looking at it. They need to do some carbon dating or something like that. The 14yo girl is probably the butt of a joke by some 14yo boys, and is too stupid to realize. Now I could be wrong, that could be a piece of 2billion year old mars rock that fell, I'm not a professional meteorite examiner or anything, but c'mon... -CyberBill
-Bill
d00D,
Terminal velocity for an average human body is only about 110 mi/h, or about 175 km/h, give or take a few ds/dt. Maybe top off at 200 mi/h if you really try.
A meteorite might go a bit faster, provided it is somewhat round. It will also be rather hot due to friction.
I thought I'd share this with you.
Cheers!
E
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About the only documented meteorite/human collision from 10 FUN THINGS TO DO IN AND AROUND SYLACAUGA
"In 1954, Mrs. Ann Hodges, who was napping on her couch, was awakened very suddenly when a meteorite penetrated her roof and struck her on the thigh. The Hodges or Sylacauga meteorite, which weighs 8.5 pounds and is 7 by 5 inches in diameter, can be viewed in replica form at the museum. The original is in the Alabama Museum of Natural History in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Sylacauga is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records since this is the only case of a meteorite hitting a living person."
Althoug she was not hit directly. The meteorite bounced of some other junk in her house before striking her.
Some people seem to think so. Sadly, such impacts generally turn out to have far more mundane explanations.
From an issue of Maxim:
Someone wrote in asking if a penny dropped from the empire state building could kill someone on the ground. A physicist contacted by Maxim suggested fastening g a length of string to the penny and holding it out the window of a moving car. When the penny is at 45 degrees, check the spedometer and that is a very rough estimate of the object's terminal velocity. Maxim's penny only had a rough terminal velocity of 16mph. The metorite could be similar. We still don't know its speed entering the atmosphere and how long it took to fall through.
And she said it looked "rusty". Meteorites are black; they can't oxidize in space.
Presumably that it where the speculation that it may be Martian in origin originates. One might expect Mars crust to be both stony and oxidised. Martian meteorites are pretty rare though, so it makes the story more unlikely. It's barely possible though.
"Gentlemen, I would rather believe that two Yankee professors would lie than believe that stones fall from heaven." -- Thomas Jefferson
Check out Rain of Iron and Ice by John Lewis. In the chapter titled "Effects on Human Population" there's a comprehensive list of damage, injuries, and deaths in historical records (about half the listings have attributable sources), all but one of which occurred the Common Era ("Anno Domini"). The first fatality listed which isn't just attributed to "stones falling like rain", or some such, is in 1511 (an monk in Italy, along with some birds and a sheep). Another Italian monk bought it in 1664.
A French farmer and some of his cattle were killed in his cottage when it collapsed due to a strike. In 1827 and 1870 in India, two men were hit (one on the arm, the other was stunned).
The 1908 blast in Tunguska, Siberia, picked people and their tents up and threw them through the air. In 1929, a member of a wedding party in Yugoslavia was killed. A boy in Uganda was hit by one of 48 stones that fell together in 1992.
And Mrs. Annie Hodges of Sylacauga, Alabama, was the one struck in her house in 1954 while resting.
There are a _lot_ on the list from China (longer records), nearly as many close calls (only a few meters away--like the guy who watched his mailbox get nailed), and dozens of building strikes (houses were hit in Wethersfield, Conn., in 1971 and 1982).
If these things are irregularly shaped, tumbling action would cause quite a bit of drag and slow them down even more. Also, if they come in shallow, there'll be a lot more time to slow than if they come in steeply. That would also account for some of the reports of hot objects--a long, shallow approach has more "flight" time after ablation (combusting gases from the surface) stops.
Why would you think it would be radioactive? The vast majority of meteorites aren't.
;) it had shed quite a bit of both thermal and kinetic energy. And finally -- I've found meteorites that looked very much like the one in the picture, and one of the surprising things about them is how light they are. They're not solid chunks of rock; their outer surfaces are a kind of frozen rock foam, presumably because of what happens to them on their way through the atmosphere. So I have no problem believing that one of these could hit someone on the foot without doing serious damage.
And it's not surprising that her leg wasn't reduced to "smoldering remains." No doubt the meteorite did get quite hot on the upper atmosphere, but by the time it got nearer ground level (and went through England's usual cloud cover
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.