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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.
like nasa? or fcc? or riaa?
Yes. Except, you'd probably get a paper cut from the ticket and a subsequent deadly rare bacterial infection and die. That's not _good_ luck, getting hit by a meteorite. Oh... he got struck by lightning? Better have _him_ handle my finances. :P
Dismantle globally, renew locally.
she was walking all alone
down the street in the alley
her name was sally
she never saw it
when she was hit by space junk
in new york miami beach
heavy metal fell in cuba
angola saudi arabia
on xmas eve said norad
a soviet sputnik hit africa
india venezuela (in texas kansas)
it's falling fast peru too
it keeps coming
and now i'm mad about space junk
i'm all burned out about space junk
oooh walk & talk about space junk
it smashed my baby's head
and now my sally's dead
No. Not really. Those are the lyrics to the Devo song, "Space Junk".
My other first post is car post.
Now thats a first for the internet. Someone asking for more hair on a 14 year old!! ;)
"I saw it fall from above roof height," Siobhan told BBC News Online.
And it hit her foot. Man, I see an unidentified object coming at me from above roof height and I'm getting out of the way. I'll figure out what it is later.
But then I guess no one would write about that...
So far in the last year we've had:
- Mozilla 1.0 released
- A story on Slashdot about how a guy switched from Linux back to Windows, XP no less
- I got a girlfriend. (I'm man enough to admit that's not easy when you play with computers for a living)
- Nintendo launch two game systems plus a highly anticipated title ON TIME
- A girl getting hit by a meteorite
Yeesh. What a year.
1. Get a rock
2. Say it's a meteorite that hit you on the foot.
3. BBC believes you, publishes goofy photo of you holding your "meteorite"
4. ???
5. Profit
Alternately, all your beowulf cluster of meteorite are belong to us.
Yeah, that should about cover it.
My deviantArt site
...Hillary Rosen or Jack Valenti mention that the mp3 format or P2P file-sharing networks may not be as evil as the dripping semen of Beelzebub. ...Stallman accidentally says 'Linux' in a moment of pique rather than 'Gnu/Linux'. ...The software or media industry creates an truly uncrackable format for copy-protecting the data on CD's ...Taco posts a story to the front page of Slashdot without a single spelling error on his part. ...Natalie Portman does not run screaming from anything that looks remotely like a nerd. ...A new Slashdot reader goes six months without perma-filtering JonKatz.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
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!
It's possible this isn't a meteorite. It would have hurt (but probably not much more than having the same rock thrown at you); since the article didn't mention it, I assume she was undamaged by the impact. Perhaps it hit her after a bounce.
Anyway, the thing that caught me was that she said it was hot to the touch. Small meteorites tend to be cold by the time they hit the ground. They are mostly iron, so they conduct heat well, and cool off fast in the upper atmosphere.
And she said it looked "rusty". Meteorites are black; they can't oxidize in space.
It will be interesting to see if there's a follow-up on this.
BTW, here is a picture of a car in NY that was hit by a 12.5-kg meteorite in 1995. Ouch!
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
I wonder if
I find it kinda cool that nobody (*in recorded history*) has ever been killed by a meteorite.
I always thought that too, but while googling for a picture of the Peekskill Meteorite car, I stumbled on this page, which shows at least three separate incidents where a person was killed by a meteorite. None have happened recently, though.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
The stone could have come from Mars, according to expert on Earth impacts Dr Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University.
What was the purpose of this paragraph? It just comes out of nowhere, and the subject abruptly dropped. Is there some reason to believe it might be from Mars, rather than, say, anywhere else? Does it matter? Was the reporter concerned that the Martians were hurling rocks at little girls' feet?
It just struck me as though this reporter didn't have the faintest clue what they were reporting on, but remembered some buzz about meteors from Mars a few years back...
sig fault
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
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Hey man, consider her lucky... she could have been killed. I mean, what do you think would have happened if she, say, was hiding out in Flanders' bomb shelter?
In all fairness, have you ever thrown a rock from any real height? I just did an experiment, I went up to the roof of my building and dropped a rock (about 1.5" dia, solid composition) off the top (12 story, actually 14 to the street), and it hit so damn hard that it blew apart. Now, tell me this would'nt hurt... The only way this may have not hurt is if the thing had enough holes in it to lighten it enough to not hurt you... which is doubtful considering that the iron content is usually way up there.
From the meteorite's perspective, it got hit by a fast-moving girl.
Imagine being a rock drifting thru space. (Don't tell my boss, but I do it all day).
Out of nowhere a big blue ball appears and keeps getting bigger and bigger until a human foot smacks you right in the keaster.
The daily newspaper for meteorites, The Rock Chronicles[1], right now probably has a story running titled, "Human Foot Hits Citizen".
[1] I don't know if they have "Rolling Stone" there.
Table-ized A.I.
(* Apparently, this [positron-press.co.uk] is the only documented case in which a meteorite has hit someone. Now, that must hurt! *)
I don't mean to be cruel, for I could use the same advice, but if that lady in the hospital photo lost a some weight, it looks like the stone would have *missed* her rather large tummy.
The physics are simple: Bigger people are bigger targets.
Perhaps we should start sleeping standing up to present a smaller target profile area. Our foil hats will stay on better that way also.
Table-ized A.I.
but from what I've learned, small rocks falling from outer space burn up in a brief little fireball, and big rocks falling from outer space MAKE GIANT FUCKING HOLES IN THE GROUND.
What about medium sized rocks, smartass?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
In a newspaper here in Finland it said it fell at her feet, not that it actually hit her. I'd say it's quite probable it didn't hit her, but the reporter streched the story a bit to give it a better twing. When you read the article, it very quickly gets over the point of it actually hitting her.
Also (as mentioned in another comment) the point of it being from Mars is totally bogus. Probably the "expert" they interviewed mentioned that some meteorites can come from Mars, and the reporter immediately picked it up, saying "The stone may have come from Mars."
I doubt, therefore I may be.
Let's see if I've got this right:
No corroborating evidence at all except the word of the adolescent girl herself. Nobody else saw it. Nobody but she can testify that it was warm.
They say they "plan" to have the stone analyzed by scientists, but it hasn't happened yet.
Even the scientist couldn't prove that someone hadn't warmed up a meteorite and pitched it over the rooftops.
I have no doubt Charles Fort would put this in his newspaper clippings file, but the only thing that's remarkable about this to me is that the BBC would publish it.
I bet a nickel that there's never even any followup story reporting on any scientist's report on the meteorite. I can just see the family in their car on their way to the university and the embarrassed kid 'fesses up.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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
Well, sure she was hit by a meteorite, but I would expect that thing to leave a crator where she stood, or at the very least mangle her foot a little. I didn't even see anything about light bruising in the article.
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