[News] Big meteor hits Ural mountains in Russia

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Staff member
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/02/15/breaking_huge_meteor_explodes_over_russia.html

Apparently, at about 09:30 local time, a very big meteor burned up over Chelyabinsk, a city in Russia just east of the Ural mountains, and about 1500 kilometers east of Moscow.The fireball was incredibly bright, rivaling the Sun! There was a pretty big sonic boom from the fireball, which set off car alarms and shattered windows. I’m seeing some reports of many people injured (by shattered glass blown out by the shock wave). I’m also seeing reports that some pieces have fallen to the ground, but again as I write this those are unconfirmed.
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Gusto

Gusto

Apart from the hurt people, this is kinda cool. There are videos on YouTube that are pretty sweet.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Wonder if it's related to the one that's supposed to miss us narrowly today. Like a "cluster" of sorts, with only the bigger one being detected ahead of time.
 
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Dave said:
Wonder if it's related to the one that's supposed to miss us narrowly today. Like a "cluster" of sorts, with only the bigger one being detected ahead of time.
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From Plait's article:

I’m trying to piece together what happened from the videos. First of all, I do not think this is related in any way to the asteroid 2102 DA14! For one thing, this occurred about 16 hours before DA14 passes. At 8 kilometers per second that’s nearly half a million kilometers away from DA14. That puts it on a totally different orbit.
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Dave

Dave

Staff member
Well, that's an assumption. It really depends on from where these asteroids originated. Were they a part of a long-ago astrological event? Seems a little too coincidental that these two large objects would be traveling in the same basic (again, astrologically speaking) trajectory.

Of course, Plait is much more educated than myself when it comes to this (dude worked on the Hubble!), but there's just no way to know what if any relation the two objects have without some sort of analysis of the individual compositions.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Just listened to a different thing from JPL and they say it's entirely possible the two objects came from the same event. So there! :p
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Tress said:
Everyone who looked at the meteor would have turned to sand by now if that was going to happen.* So we're going to be fine.


*Bonus points to anyone who gets that reference
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Everyone who wasn't making out in the projection booth, that is.

I admit, I was going to add that movie to the B-movie thread.
--Patrick
 
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

My favorite thing about all of this is that there are now Russian Truthers who claim it wasn't a meteor but rather a missile from the US. They think we're trying to start the cold war all over again.
 
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

Krisken said:
Yeah, cause that was so much fun the first 50 years.
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Laugh if you will, but Russian soldiers were the first on the scene. Whether this was to check for missile debris or to steal the meteorite for a general sell, they sure as hell mobilized fast.
 
North_Ranger

North_Ranger

Staff member
AshburnerX said:
Laugh if you will, but Russian soldiers were the first on the scene. Whether this was to check for missile debris or to steal the meteorite for a general sell, they sure as hell mobilized fast.
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How is that surprising? I mean, if the same happened in the United States, you could be damn sure that the army would be there first.

Heck, even in Finland the army would be there first.
 
TommiR

TommiR

North_Ranger said:
How is that surprising? I mean, if the same happened in the United States, you could be damn sure that the army would be there first.

Heck, even in Finland the army would be there first.
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Yeah, pretty much. If the scale of an emergency is big enough to overwhelm local resources, then the military is the only place where large amounts of manpower can be mobilised on short notice.

Aren't the National Guard also prominently deployed in the US when there is some natural disaster where extra manpower is needed for the relief effort?
 
AshburnerX

AshburnerX

I think the difference here is that the Russian army has already secreted off whatever landed, where as the meteorite would belong to the owner of the property it landed on anywhere else. I doubt it's a conspiracy, but it certainly feels like a Red Army General decided he'd make a quick buck.
 
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More from Plait:

Not only that, but another known human trait is to be more aware of an event once one happens. Buy a car, and suddenly you see that model everywhere on the road. Same thing here: We had two big asteroid stories, so people were thinking about it. Then a bright fireball was reported over the San Francisco Bay area, and people freaked. But really, bright meteors like that happen all the time. It’s rare that a week or two goes by that I don’t hear about one someplace, and the web is filled with videos of them.
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astr...teors_why_are_we_suddenly_seeing_so_many.html

I did some digging on my own, and the statistics are difficult to compute, but something like 10000-20000 meteors larger than a football (either definition) hit the earth annually, and literally tons of smaller ones hit each day.
 
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