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Why Meteoroids Explode Before Hitting the Earth (qz.com)
According to a new study from Purdue University, scientists have figured out why meteoroids explode before hitting the Earth. "The research, published in the December issue of the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science, shows that as meteoroids plunge, the high-pressure air they push against find its way into the objects' pores and cracks, forcing their bodies apart from the inside," reports Quartz. "The result is a kind of detonation that looks like an explosion." From the report: To explain the astrophysics, researchers focused their work on a widely viewed February 2013 meteoroid explosion place over Chelyabinsk, Russia, a city of 1.1 million north of the Kazakhstan border. Researchers ran a computer program that allowed for them to simulate what happened to the meteoroid in the atmosphere. "Our simulations reveal a previously unrecognized process in which the penetration of high-pressure air into the body of the meteoroid greatly enhances the deformation and facilitates the breakup of meteoroids similar to the size of Chelyabinsk," the study states. The researchers added that while the air pressure is effective at breaking apart small meteoroids, larger ones would likely withstand the force as they come to Earth.
Something about the OP doesn't make sense.
And no, not the fact that there isn't much in the way of "high-pressure air" at the outermost fringes of our atmosphere...
The part which seems a little odd is to suggest that altering the apparent pressure [i.e. by the velocity of entry] can in some way "force" air into the cracks within a meteorite/meteorid to induce some form of break-up.
Isn't it much more likely to be induced by the coefficient of expansion of the material concerned? If you take a meteorite and then flash-heat the outer surface very, very, very quickly - like for example by slamming it into an atmosphere at several thousand kph - then the outer layer will become very, very hot very quickly - and start to expand. The interior, meanwhile, simply won't have had time to warm up and thus will remain space-cold... As the outer layer warms, it expands. This would easily be enough to cause cracks in the material [think of the way that you can split a rock by pouring water into a crack and then waiting for the water to freeze...].
It's been a while since I studied CFD [computational fluid dynamics - which is the science that would show how atmospheric gases would "flow" around an meteorite as it entered the atmosphere - but I think it's fair to say that a "boundary layer" would form that might in fact make it ridiculously difficult for "high pressure air" to be "forced" into tiny cracks in the surface.
So... very interesting theory, but I think we might find that things like the irregular shape and density of the material [which causes non-uniform stress on the material] coupled with very high speed heating, might be significant factors too...