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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.'"
(See Niven and Pournelle for consequences of a larger one.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Do meteørites sound different with a slash through the middle?
Yeah its probably fake, but cool nonetheless:3 733199771&q=meteor
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=465344881
And for all you language nazis out there, meteorite is a silly word and should be abolished.
I guess but if I recall correctly hiroshima did a little bit more then just "blow in some curtains". Even if accurate this is a pretty bad metaphor, the Hiroshima bomb brings on ideas of destruction and chaos. Even if you took the radiation aspect away from the Hiroshima bomb it still would have done far more damage. Guess the whole line of "location, location, location" really is true.
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
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.
Steve Jobs's giant wallscreen sparkles to life. A visibly pale and shaken Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg appears with a panicked situation room full of Norwegian officials behind him.
"Ah, Prime Minister, good," Jobs says with a trademarked smile. "I see you got our little message. Let's finish our chat about DRM regulations...."
(reference)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Nø really! She was carving her initials intø the side øf a røck with a sharpened interspace tøøthbrush given tø her by Svenge -her brøther in law- an an øslø dentist and star øf many Nørweigan møvies: "The Høt Hands øf an øslø Dentist", "Fillings øf Passiøn", "The Huge Mølars øf Hørst Nørdfink"...
.....
Mynd you, Meteørite hits kan be pretti nasti
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
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
.. what we're really concerned about: Høw many møøses gøt killed?
I'm Rocco. I'm the +5 Funny man.
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.
Yes, it's real. The impact also showed up on seismic recorders http://www.astro.uio.no/ita/nyheter/ildkule06/ildk ule06.html (You can study the images in this Norwegian article from the University of Oslo).
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?
There is a difference in how the energy was distributed. With the A-Bomb, it was an atmospheric blast. With the space rock, the energy was absorbed into the Earths crust.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
Im just happy that it didnt hit anywhere else. Like New York, or any other big city.
I almost (alomst!) wish it landed near enough one to cause some decent damage. Then maybe people would take the threat of a planet killer serious enough to get a properly funded space program going so a some of us could get off planet (like me). AD ASTRA!
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Yeah, but how many Libraries of Congress is that?
Well, Hiroshima was 15 kilotons or 6.3x10^13 J and one burning Library of Congress is 7.3×10^14 J, so ~8.5% of one LoC per meteor strike.
Yeah, I'm going to go pretend I didn't just spend part of my Friday night researching that calculation now...
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 --
Followed through to the link mentioned earlier: http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/article134 6820.ece
1 57.html
From that article, this one line jumped out at me: "Enorm fart."
Now granted, I don't speak the native tongue up there in Norway, but I think we all can translate that.
Also found this sesmic data on the web: http://www.norsar.no/NDC/bulletins/gbf/2006/GBF06
NORTH OF SVALBARD
Origin time Lat Lon Azres Timres Wres Nphase Ntot Nsta Netmag
2006-157:02.13.21.0 83.81 2.84 5.25 0.18 1.49 2 2 1 0.04
Sta Dist Az Ph Time Tres Azim Ares Vel Snr Amp Freq Fkq Pol Arid Mag
SPI 668.3 346.0 Pn 02.14.50.4 0.2 349.0 3.0 10.1 5.2 50.5 4.93 1 345124
SPI 668.3 346.0 Sn 02.15.55.8 0.2 338.5 -7.5 5.8 4.1 34.0 8.43 3 2 345125 0.04
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.
Assuming typical velocity, an iron asteroid would be a mere 22 miles across. The radiation would only be two-thirds that of the porus asteroid at the same speed.
If this was indeed the impact crater that triggered the initial phase of the Great Extinction, then the low density/high energy strike would produce vastly more heat and therefore affect the climate that much more.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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.
After climbing a little higher, he found a large, glowing piece of rock. He walked around it, astonished, and from one angle you could see an unmistakable engraving on the side.
LEAVE THE PIRATES ALONE