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Record Meteorite Hits Norway
equex256 writes "Early Wednesday morning, a meteorite streaked across the sky in northern Norway, near Finland and Russia. A witness (Article in Norwegian) went up the mountain to where it hit and reported seeing large boulders that had fallen out of the mountainside, along with many broken trees. Norwegian astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told Aftenposten, Norway's largest newspaper, that he would compare the explosive force of the impact with the Hiroshima bomb. This meteorite is suspected to be much larger than the 90-kilo (198-pound) meteorite which hit Alta in 1904, previously recognized as the largest to hit Norway. From the article: 'Røed Ødegaard said the meteorite was visible to an area of several hundred kilometers despite the brightness of the midnight sunlit summer sky. The meteorite hit a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms.'"
Hehe, I'm norwegian, but to mee, that sounds really funny!!! =) In norwegian it's "meteoritt" :-) Bøtt ank ju, veldig gudd! :-)
Was it as big as the one that (supposedly) fell at Tunguska? Although I'm still pretty sure that was caused by dark matter or a UFO or something.
Of course the meteor would not have had any noteworthy radioactivity and was not in a populated area. I don't remember exactly how often it's estimated to happen and I can't find any sources, but meteors of this size hit the earth a lot more often than most people realize...something like between once a year and once a decade. The comparison to Hiroshima really is about the energy of the impact, not the destructiveness. Little boy had a yield equivalent to approximately 15,000 tons of TNT.
Here is the website of the newspaper and pictures of the meteorite in the sky and the impact: http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article134 6820.ece
Whenever the topic of meteors comes up, someone has to post a link to the University of Arizona impact effects calculator. Play with the numbers, see if you can destroy the earth.
Also worth checking out along the Lucifer's hammer line of thought is How to Destroy the Earth
I tried a quick reverse engineering of the meteor with the calculator. An iron meteor 4.5 meters in diameter moving 20 km/s hitting crystalline rock at 45 degrees will have a yield of 18 kilotons...slightly higher than the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima. The average interval of an impact of this size on earth is about once every 5 years. Most go largely unnoticed. The earth is a big place.
I wonder (1) how recent and what resolution Google Earth's latest imagery is, and (2) can we get them to take another shot ASAP and compare them?
Actually, I saw a paper presented back in the late 90's that fairly convincingly made the case for a mostly iron meteor. The author's contention was that the object slowed due to air resistance, it would heat up. As is heated, the metal would have softenned. As it softenned, the metal would start to pancake like a dum-dum bullet. As it pancakes, its air resistance increases, causing it to slow down even more and heat up even faster, causing it to pancake even more... until you get an airbirst at an altitude with on the order of magnitude suggested by the tree angles at Tunguska. If you acept his hypothesis about the meteor's composition, there were no major contradictions in the evidence.
> The tabloids probably wouldn't pay enough
maybe the tabloids wouldn't, but meteroites are worth more per pound than gold.
if you could recover a couple pounds of those 98 pounds you'll be buying any car you wanted.
We had one of these a few weeks ago in south east New Mexico. The explosion shook the house. People that did see it said it was the 'size of a dinner plate' before it exploded. Unfortunately nobody had a camera handy. Didn't get much media coverage at all.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
What sounds so strange about it?
If you mean linguistically, I guess I can see what you mean - I think they're trying to use "midnight sun" as a single noun, making "midnight sunlit" an adjective.
But yes, the sky really is sunlit 24/7 up there right now.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
When I seven I was in our very large backyard swinging on our swingset with my friends one summer when we saw this streak of light high in the sky. It was only visible for a few seconds, but as we watched the streak grew brighter until it streaked over the roof of our house. About twenty or thirty feet above the ground it seemed to disintigrate with a popping sound. We searched the backyard for debris but didn't find anything. The meteorite was so small that I am not surprised, but it sure was bright for something so small. That was very cool. Even our neighbor on the hill above us came running down and said he saw the meteorite and wondered if it hit our house.
Years later as a teenager I was sleeping out on our deck to avoid the summer heat inside the house and I was woken by this shrieking sound, like fireworks, except much louder. I jumped up and saw a very bright, long streak of light screaching across the sky over the lake our house overlooked. As the meteor approached the ground the screaching got louder and higher in pitch until it seemed to "pop" into nothingness. Besides the incredibly high pitched shriek, I was awed by how bright the meteor was as it lit up our deck like a very bright lantern.
Obviously, both these meteorites do not compare in size to the one that hit Norway, but it was still an awe inspiring sight.
Most insurance policies don't cover "acts of God" or even "natural disasters" of this type.
:)
Why do people still think we live in the 19th century?
Insurance policies today typically cover most Acts of God. Hail, lightning, windstorm, water damage, you name it. What they don't cover is "catastrophes so big we'd need a few billion to even start paying claims".
Hell, you can actually buy earthquake, tornado, and hurricane insurance, if you're willing to pay for it. However, your $400/year policy doesn't quite amoritize out to the 1 in 50 year chance of your part of the gulf coast being destroyed.
For the record (and to stay on topic): impact by falling object is generally covered. Some go far enough to ensure you for falling aircraft (creepy), and possibly falling spacecraft (satellites is the idea, but who knows what will happen this July).
And yes, I used to sell property insurance
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Perhaps you're mistaking entry mass for landing mass?
A meteorite's surface vapourizes from reentry heat when it enters the atmosphere. If the meteorite is small enough, the entire object will be plasma long before it hits the ground; it takes a large or dense object to survive reentry, and even then much of it's mass is lost.
That doesn't however mean that it disperses. There is at least one theory that a meteorite could hit the ground as a ball of plasma with a solid core, due to the surrounding air pressure preventing the superheated surface from dispersing even after it vapourizes. I seem to recall seeing this put forward for the Tunguska blast in Siberia. IANA Astrophysicist, so I don't know how fast the object would need to be moving, or how large it would have to be initially, to produce this effect.
If that did happen, what would you use for your calculations? The mass of the meteorite wouldn't all be solid when it hit, and whatever material wasn't vapourized by descent or on impact would only make up a fraction of the mass present during the impact. The core might be 90kg, or 300kg, or whatever, but using that figure to calculated the speed the object on impact would be incorrect. You'd need to mass of the meteorite on reentry, minus whatever mass bled off during descent.
However, I would agree that comparing the impact to an atomic bomb blast is silly. It's like comparing a firecracker explosion to a bullet impact - yes, you can say that one has X amount of energy and the other has Y (and you could probably calculate this by measuring the gunpowder present in each, and determining how much energy you get from burning it), but that comparison doesn't actually tell you anything useful, since the energy is applied in a very different fashion. It's comparing apples to oranges.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.