A Softball is 9.7cm in diameter
Meaning that space rock was 25.1 metres in size!
This pointless calculation has been brought to you by the Meaninglessly Over-Precise and Under-Accurate Numericalism Department.
Oh my, Grandma, what a big meteorite you have right there on your pillow under that hole in the roof
It was almost midnight in Golden, British Columbia, Canada, a Rocky Mountain city near the border with Alberta, when a meteorite crashed through the roof and landed next to the head of 66-year-old grandma Ruth Hamilton. According to numerous reports, Hamilton had been asleep for hours on October 3rd, when her dog barked twice …
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Wednesday 13th October 2021 08:39 GMT W.S.Gosset
Re: A Softball is 9.7cm in diameter
This event will also form a useful contribution to our ongoing research project: "Do Dogs Cause Meteorites?" The seed for this topic was our lead researcher --a notably peevish and dim individual-- noting that a well-known Sherlock Holmes incident could just as easily have been labelled: "The Meteorite That Did Not Crash Through The Roof At Night." After it was explained to him, he sought the bottle then a grant and here we are.
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Wednesday 13th October 2021 08:55 GMT Marc 13
*cough*
Standards please...
"a meteorite the size of a football field hits Earth" Is that an American football "field", or a (real) football *pitch*?
And how is area relevant to a 3 dimensional lump of rock/ice?
But most importantly, these should be in el Reg std. units... therefore (if a football pitch) 194.89nWa.
*/cough*
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Thursday 14th October 2021 01:52 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Bruce Willis will be relieved.
I think by the time you posted, he'd already landed again.
I watched the playback. From touchdown to getting out took longer than the time from launch to touchdown. The ground crew have to drive as close as they can get then walk the rest of the way. For the price BO charges, I'd expect a helicopter to come out to take me back to my mansion, not some guys in a pick-up!
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Thursday 14th October 2021 01:54 GMT John Brown (no body)
"them meteorites are probably worth enough to at least repair the roof and replace the duvet."
The insurance company have already agreed to pay up. Knowing the money grabbing tendencies of insurance companies though, they may claim they now own the meteorite since they paid for the damage it caused.
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Wednesday 13th October 2021 13:37 GMT ThatOne
Panzer bed
> a softball-sized chunk of space stuff came [...] landing on her pretty floral bedding
My, that's some incredibly solid bed she has there, with Kevlar sheets most likely. I would expect a meteorite of that size and mass, able to smash through the roof, to also go right through the bed and bury itself deep into the ground.
One could argue smashing through the roof dissipated all the kinetic energy so the rock just gently dropped on the bed, but in this case what was that bulletproof roof made from? A softball sized rock, even if it's just dropping a dozen kilometers, should accumulate a lot of kinetic energy. Black powder cannon ball levels of kinetic energy!
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Wednesday 13th October 2021 15:03 GMT Tom 7
Re: Panzer bed
Meteors tend to hit the earth's atmospheres at 10s of Km a second. And slow down all the way - especially when the break up. I would imagine the terminal velocity of a baseball sized rock to be less than 100mph. After all a skydiver pointing head down is around 180 near sea level.
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Wednesday 13th October 2021 15:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Panzer bed
It's not picking up speed dropping any amount of kilometres. It's going pretty fast entering the atmosphere,slowing as it hits the atmosphere but still above the terminal velocity of the object, so it won't speed up on its way to the surface. Perhaps it ploughed through a ton of junk in the loft and lost its speed.
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Thursday 14th October 2021 12:30 GMT ThatOne
Re: Panzer bed
> it won't speed up on its way to the surface
It doesn't really need to, does it...
My point was that it will definitely be going fast, and since we're talking about a big rock and not some pebble, have some serious kinetic energy.
So, if the kinetic energy was enough to shatter through the roof of the bedroom, how comes it didn't also go through the bed (usually much less solid than a roof)?
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Thursday 14th October 2021 09:33 GMT Sgt_Oddball
Re: Panzer bed
Having stayed at my sister-in-laws house in Canada, it depends on which floor the bedroom is.
In the sister-in-law case, the house was built on the side of a hill and her bedroom was 4 levels down. So there would have been alot of floors and furniture in the way.
So in essence, don't assume that her bedroom was directly underneath the roof since the article doesn't clarify the house's structure... Though going through the roof, giving her a drywall shower and hitting the bed that does give the impression that it might be the case.
It could also be that her roof is particularly thick with insulation/rain sheeting that might have absorbed sufficient force to give it a soft landing.
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Wednesday 13th October 2021 15:48 GMT Eclectic Man
Nearly hit by a meteorite
I was actually once nearly hit by a meteorite. I was standing at my open bedroom window when something zipped in through it. It looked like the sort of clinker you get in a fire. The largest bit was about the size of the end of my little finger.
Sadly I lost it (I was only about 12 at the time). It would have been nice to have kept my very own meteorite. On the other hand, I expect I was lucky it didn't hit me, as it was going quite fast and could easily have hurt me quite badly if it had struck an eye or something.
Such is life.
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