Wetenschap

The scientific story of Russia’s meteorite

The meteorite that hit the earth in Russia today was probably a piece of rocky material about the size of a minivan, astrophysicist Vincent Icke explains. “It’s nonsense that the Russian army had something to do with it”, he adds.

“But it could very well have harmed hundreds of people, which is rare. A meteorite this big only reaches the earth once every ten or twenty years and then mostly lands far away in the ocean.This meteorite instead shocked the inhabitants of six Russian cities at once, around 1500 kilometres from Moscow.

People shot video’s of the bright light that flew past the sky and the broken windows it left behind. About 400 people have probably been injured with three of them in a serious condition.

Other than the rumours suggest, it couldn’t have been a satellite or part of a rocket, Icke says. “It went way faster than that. If a piece of a rocket reaches the earth you can see that coming for days, you can calculate the place of the crash and then just wait for it to happen. But this meteorite crash happened in a few minutes.

That’s why Icke thinks it’s nonsense that the Russian army let the meteorite explode. The thing was about the size of minivan, even with a telescope you can’t see that coming from very far. It also had a speed of 20 to 60 kilometres per second, so it’s just impossible to react in time.

The actual crash of the piece of rock didn’t cause the most damage, Icke says. “All the broken windows are a result of the shockwave the meteorite started. Because it moves a lot faster than sound, which travels at only 1000 km per hour, it causes a shock and a big wave of sound. This is so loud that it can easily crash windows.”

This also explains what we see in the You Yube movie below. We see people filming the tracks that the meteorite left in the air, and then we hear the crash. According to Icke it’s probably minutes after the meteorite passes that the sound shockwave arrives and blows the windows out, setting off the alarms of many cars at once.

Source: Vincent Icke, Bnr

Gepubliceerd op United Academics