by TThe inner solar system is much quieter than 4 billion years ago, during the so -called time of heavy bombing. In the course of this violent route, which lasted about 500 million years, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Moon were regularly beaten by asteroids, meters and other cosmic ordnance, many of the objects that were as large as the six miles wide rocks that stretched out the dinosaurs. Since then, things have become much quieter, but that doesn’t mean that everything went quietly. The earth still lives in a shooting gallery with thousands of objects – according to NASA, which correspond to about 48.5 tons per year – that correspond to the atmosphere.
Yesterday, one of these space rock boulders exploded in heaven at 11:51 am in heaven over Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina, such as the National Weather Service (NWS). The brilliant Flash, which was accompanied by a sound boom, which many were involved in an earthquake, led to hundreds of calls and contributions to the American Meteor Society (AMS), the recommended organization of NASA to report on Meteoric Fireballs. In Henry County, Ga., A house was hit by ruins that broke through the roof and landed in the residence. No injuries were reported.
“The Henry County Emergency Management Agency [EMA] Further passed on to us that a citizen reported that a “rock” fell through their ceiling around the time of the reports of the earthquake, “said the NWS in a Facebook post.
The possibility that something from heaven fell this week was not entirely unexpected. Yesterday’s event occurred during the ongoing Bootid meteor shower, which takes place once every 6.37 when the earth leads through the remains of the tail of Comet 7p/Pons-wincut. The Bootid is just one of dozens of well -known showers who list the AMS lists on its website. Many of these events produce only a beautiful fog of meteor fragments, which are only referred to at night under dark conditions outside the urban lights and generally as a shooting star.
The yesterday’s rock came from a extremely larger caliber, whose large enough is to be classified as a bolid, a meteor with sufficient mass to cause a light flash and a sound boom when it hits the atmosphere, but too small for most of it to reach the floor without being burned first. In order to qualify as a bolid, an in -depth meteor must reach the brightness of Venus, which, like the moon, is often visible in the daily sky. According to NASA, a few dozen bolide appear every year.
Bolide’s latest Bolide event occurred on February 15, 2013 via Chelyabinsk, Russia, as an object that was estimated to measure 65 feet, in the atmosphere, which injured almost 1,500 people and damaged 7,200 buildings. The largest bolide of the Modern History also hit Russia at the famous Tunguska event from 1908, as a 350 foot. Meteor flattened 830 SQ. mi. of the forest country.
Low meteorical fireworks are much, much more often than bolides. According to the AMS, several thousand small fire balls form in the atmosphere every day, but “the vast majority of these,” says the organization, “occur in the oceans and uninhabited regions, and many are masked in daylight.”
Regardless of the Henry County House, which was hit by the latest bolide, the opportunities of a single place – or a person – are influenced by space waste. Hardly 5% of the objects that enter the atmosphere survive the steps and reach the surface. About 70% of this surface are ocean and a large part of the others is a desert or other sparse terrain. After all, most meteorites that hit the planet are too small at the time of the impact of micrometeorites – too small to cause damage at all. In All of Known Human History, in Fact, there is only one person who is Believed to have bees killed by a meteorite – an indian bus driver who Struck on the campus of an engineering college in the state of Tamil Nadu on Feb. 6, 2016 Same Fate as One in the Total Number of Human Beings Who Have Walked the Earth Since the Dawn of homo sapiens About 300,000 years ago.
This does not mean that there were no close calls. On May 1, 1860, a horse was killed by a meteorite strike in Concord, Ohio. In 1954 a woman from Alabama – her picture and published in the edition of Life Magazine on December 13, 1954 – was told strictly heavy bruising on her hand and side when a meteorite of 10 pounds plunged through her roof while she was a nap on her sofa. Place yesterday’s event in the category of lightning strikes or sharks of sharks – theoretically possible, very unlikely, another thing that you can take your worring list.
Write Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.
