Slashdot Mirror
Russian Meteor Largest In a Century
gbrumfiel writes "A meteor that exploded over Russia's Chelyabinsk region this morning was the largest recorded object to strike the earth in more than a century, Nature reports. Infrasound data collected by a network designed to watch for nuclear weapons testing suggests that today's blast released hundreds of kilotons of energy. That would make it far more powerful than the nuclear weapon tested by North Korea just days ago, and the largest rock to strike the earth since a meteor broke up over Siberia's Tunguska river in 1908. Despite its incredible power, the rock evaded detection by astronomers. Estimates show it was likely only 15 meters across — too small to be seen by networks searching for near earth asteroids."
Today's meteor event came a day after California scientists proposed a system to vaporize asteroids that threaten Earth. Of course, the process needs to be started when the asteroid is still tens of millions of kilometers away; there's no chance to shoot down something that's already arrived.
They say to expect a Tunguska sized one once a century and this one wasn't that big. They mostly ocean explode or strike so there's few signs of them but an ocean strike can be worse than a land one given the water they displace. They've got to wake up and start properly funding the near Earth program. It still won't protect against rouges but at least they can map ones that cross our orbit.
My favorite book on impacts. Scarier than any Stephen King novel you'll ever read, because it's real.
http://www.amazon.com/Rain-Iron-And-Ice-Bombardment/dp/0201154943/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360966611&sr=8-1&keywords=rain+of+iron+and+ice
In USA, prisoners smash rocks. In Soviet Russia, rocks smashes prisoners!
Anyone seen pictures of pieces on the ground ? (The hole in Lake Chebarkul doesn't count.) There should be a nice strewn field from this event, and it shouldn't be hard to find pieces, which would tell us what it was made of.
"A meteor that exploded over Russia's Chelyabinsk region this morning was the largest recorded object to strike the earth in more than a century, Nature reports."
Meteors don't hit earth, meteorites do.
Ezekiel 23:20
It was "the biggest interdimensional cross rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909!" I wonder if Dr. Egon Spengler is en route to Russia right now trying to get samples of victims' brain tissue?
This one, Tunguska,and one in 1947 called Sikhote-Alin that some are claiming is bigger than yesterday's rock (though still smaller than Tunguska).
Granted, Russia is the largest country in the world by land area but do *all* the big rocks have to land there?
I wouldn't hold my breath.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Energy is measured in joules fools.
this thing was 15 meters across, jet black, and moving like a bat out of hell. To paraphrase people that look for near earth objects "Its invisible until it hits the atmosphere." The sad fact of the matter is, no matter how much money you pour into programs to locate and track near earth objects, there is no way to detect objects of this size and velocity with any degree of reliability.
The fine summary notes,
Well, there's part of the problem right there -- we don't want to shoot the things *down*, we want to shoot them *up* and *away*. Meteors and asteroids are only a problem when they come down!
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I thought it was a piece of comet that exploded over Siberia's Tunguska river in 1908 - I also thought it was common knowledge - go figure.
So, despite "serious" news agencies (like Associated Press) saying otherwise, it turns out this thing wasn't just a 10 ton asteroid. Which isn't entirely unsurprising. Getting a shockwave like that simply took the energy of a small thermonuclear warhead.
Now I'm still wondering, what about the reports that the russians tried to shoot down the asteroid? It's not unrealistic it's like ... almost real!
By convention, it is the energy released by spontaneous decomposition of 1000t of trinitrotoluol - or 4.2 TJ of energy.
Meteorite was originally coined as a mineral name, specifically for the high nickle iron content meteors that were effectively an iron ore, like magnetite, hematite or siderite. The people who adapted this word to mean just any rock that fell from space were going against the more precise use. It's like somebody had an at least fairly precise term, such as bird, and people adapted it to include many other things that fly (bats, pterosaurs, maple-seeds and certain types of origami), and then half of them got all Grammer Nazi on people who used the phrase 'dead birds' and the rest on the ones who wanted to lump DC-3s in with those other things, and yet none of the Grammer Nazis could admit they had stolen a term from a bunch of biologists and really mangled its use to where it's not surprising the general public isn't going along 'properly'. Here, the astronomers 'stole' the term from metalurgy and mangled the definition, then within a few generations we have astronomers and fans all upset with the public for not sticking with this misuse.
Who is John Cabal?
The asteroid clearly read all the "we want to catch and mine an asteroid" stories on slashdot lately and was all like "Ok, I'm coming down"
EMP from a nuclear bomb occurs when gamma radiation ionises the upper atmosphere. A non-nuclear explosion does not produce gamma rays and so no EMP occurs.
No.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
How much do you make by ripping videos off and stuffing them with ads? Does Youtube really pay you to do that?
Unless you're talking about the translucent watermark in the top right corner of the video, I think you may have a browser security/annoyance vulnerability.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Are you seriously trying to extrapolate the number of meteors based on the number of observations submitted to a website facing both growing popularity and growing population of internet users?
Using similar methods, we can conclude that the population of cats has exploded exponentially in the last decade, and we should all be waist deep in cats shortly.