I've never understood the logic of the phrase "meteoric rise". There's one thing meteors do, and rising ain't it.
First Tunguska and now this. I think the aliens from Alpha Centauri must have it in for the Russians for some reason.
It's good those dash cams were finally able to capture something hurtling towards them besides other Russians.
The crater is impressive, though not as impressive as Labs's colon.
I've posted a map centered on the West/boro nuts, maybe the aliens will improve their aim and leave the rural Russians alone.
Have we moved this conversation over here now? The Guardian live blog has some fairly impressive pics and video.
I suppose it was already the consensus that Tunguska was something like this, but it makes a lot more intuitive sense to me now - this impact shattered windows and blew open doors, whereas Tunguska was bigger and knocked over trees.
Estimate is 2 meters? Come on, isn't there some interplanetary object scale, like how all tumors are measured relative to various fruits and hail is measured relative to sports balls? The meteor was the size of a grand piano.
15 meters is what I'm seeing - 40 tonnes.
15 metres sounds awfully big for 40 tonnes, when you consider that these things are seriously iron rich. Also, Russia is claiming "only" 10 tonnes
But black oil is less dense than iron.
No way 15 meters for 40 tonnes. That's a density of 0.64 g/cc which means it would float. Average density of meteorites is 2.5-3.5 g/cc which, if the 40 tonnes is correct, implies 3-4 meters (assuming a sphere.)
Sorry, I should have said implies medium sized pipe organ.
Assuming a spherical pipe organ.
I guess the musical instrument scale breaks down at extinction level events. BUT THEN IT WON'T MATTER ANYWAY!
I guess the musical instrument scale breaks down at extinction level events.
I guess the musical instrument scale breaks down at extinction level events
An asteroid the size of the Great Stalacpipe Organ could do some damage.
21 is the best thing I've seen on the Internet today.
15: Many asteroids are loosely consolidated piles of regolith, so it's possible to have a really low density. I don't know if that's what's going on here or if someone is just pulling numbers out of their ass, but there it is.
12: 15 meters
I wonder if that was the crater (or 'a" crater). The "big" ear miss one is only estimated at 50 meters diameter.
A meteor the size of an elephant ear would do some damage. That's a big ear.
Obviously the Stalacpipe Organ killed the dinosaurs, but was Tunguska a Melbourne Theremin or a Madison Loudspeaker?
NASA currently estimates it was 15 meters prior to entering the atmosphere.
30: Wow. Bigger than my house. Like, 8X.
31: Your house is less than two meters across? This Not So Big thing has gotten entirely out of hand.
JRoth's real name is Jakub Szczesny.
Some of the jokes going around the Russian internet. I like the "meteorite's inhabitants" one.
I can't get the image of a clown playing calliope and hurtling towards earth becoming a giant exploding ball of fire out of my head now.
DC hockey blog Russian Machine Never Breaks was one of the first American sites to report on this, according to Ms Franke-Ruta .
This is more to the other dead thread, but I checked out some library books on mass extinctions and I'm working my way through them and this stuff is really fascinating. There's a book edited by William Glen in 1994 called The Mass-Extinction Debates: How Science Works in a Crisis, a lot of which is written from a sociological/historical perspective about how scientists react to new information and perceived incursions from people outside their field, which is also really interesting, even apart from the intrinsic interest of the science itself.