14-Year-Old Boy Smote By Meteorite 435
eldavojohn writes "Winning the lottery requires incredible luck and one in a million odds. So does getting hit by a falling space rock. A 14-year-old German boy was granted a three-inch scar by the gods. A pea-sized meteorite smote young Gerrit Blank's hand before leaving a foot-sized crater on the road. The boy's account: 'At first I just saw a large ball of light, and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand. Then a split second after that there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder. The noise that came after the flash of light was so loud that my ears were ringing for hours afterwards. When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself into the road.' Curiously, the rock was magnetic, and tests were done to verify it is extraterrestrial. The Telegraph notes the only other recorded event of a meteorite striking a person was 'in November 1954 when a grapefruit-sized fragment crashed through the roof of a house, bounced off furniture and landed on a sleeping woman.' Space.com lists a few more anomalies and we discussed the probability of these things downing aircraft recently."
What's this picture for? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's this picture for? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:skeptical (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm getting a little worried about the story's veracity, too. Just the first two paragraphs have a couple of big issues:
Gerrit Blank, 14, was on his way to school when he saw "ball of light" heading straight towards him from the sky.
A red hot, pea-sized piece of rock then hit his hand before bouncing off and causing a foot wide crater in the ground.
Your average space rock is hurtling through space at ridiculous speeds, and hits the atmosphere hard. Its outer layers burn off... until it slows down to the normal terminal velocity for a rock. At that point, all the hot stuff has sprayed off into the air.
So anything hitting the ground will be 1) not glowing (the glowing part is long over) and 2) not hot (in fact, it should be covered in frost).
I call shenanigans. Show me I'm wrong. There's a first time for everything, after all. :)
Re:quote (Score:1, Insightful)
ein minuten bitte (Score:5, Insightful)
First, meteors aren't hot. Second, if a "pea-sized piece of rock" is going fast enough to make "a foot wide crater in the ground," it's not going to be "bouncing off" shit, least of all this kid's hand. It would tear through him like a shotgun slug. Was the kid's hand blown off? No? Then it didn't leave a fucking crater in the ground either. How about some photographs? Oh, there are none? Hmmm.
More likely shrapnel (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Points for creativity (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not saying I don't believe it (I'm not sure), but another point for thought is that it should have reached terminal velocity, right? I don't think a pea-sized rock falls fast enough to leave a crater the size of a foot and cause a loud bang.
On the other hand, I don't blame him for an inaccurate accounting of events--most of what we "remember" is actually reconstructions from logic.
Re:skeptical (Score:0, Insightful)
it should be covered in frost
How the fuck does stupidity of this level get modded up?
odds (Score:4, Insightful)
2 people hit out of 6 billion in the world, so odds are 1 in 3 billion or the PDOOMA 1 in 1 million FTA
what are the odds that either the androgynous boy or some reporter made the whole thing up?
Because every event gets reported? (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't count with population of 6 billion. About 1.3 of that live in India. Have you ever been to the country's poor areas (=which is nearly all of it). I've only traveled once through the country and most of that time in a train but I feel confident to say that if someone gets hit by a small meteor there, it won't get reported and confirmed.
Same is true for chine which also has over a billion people. And the poor parts of Africa... And I would guess that the same stands even for a lot of South America and Mexico...
Hell, the amount of people among which such events would likely be reported is probably closer to a billion. And even among them, only those identified as meteor strikes. I wouldn't be surprised if a few would just go "Where the hell did that come from?! WHICH ONE OF YOU FUCKERS THREW A ROCK AT ME?!"
Yeah, one in a million sounds still way of but 2 reported incidents in six billion is far, far away from two incidents in six billion.
Re:ein minuten bitte (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, they're not hot. http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/meteoric.html [badastronomy.com]
Be careful using that bold.
Re:More likely shrapnel (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty easy to invert the order when you're trying to remember events which were approximately only milliseconds apart. Especially so when you weren't expecting them to happen in the first place and so weren't paying close attention to the order.
BWAHAHAHAHA BULLSHIT (Score:4, Insightful)
Pea-sized? That's about 9mm or even larger depending upon the cultivar. I've seen peas the size of .50 caliber rounds (about 12.7mm) and at the 30,000mph in TFAHL that would not only rip the boy's hand off but probably break the bones up to his elbow from the shock. Even at 400mph it would do way more than that. Also, to be pea-sized and make a crater that large, it would have to have more mass than it should have since it's supposedly composed of primarily ferrous material.
And I doubt 30,000MPH. Maybe 250 at best.
But this *IS* the Telegraph. Not exactly a reliable source of news. I'm surprised this actually made it here.
Re:What's this picture for? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it only flew close to his hand and never touched it at all. He got burned by the speed/air/whatever, not the rock itself. But it could've felt like a hit because of the sheer speed.
Re:quote (Score:2, Insightful)
the chance of (intelligent?) life occurring twice in our universe is very small, like the chances of any one person winning the lottery
Number of people in my state: about 6 million.
Estimated number of stars in the known universe: about 70,000 million million million.
(7x10^22)
People win the lottery every week. If the chance of finding intelligent life was similar to the chance of winning the lottery, we should expect to find about 10,000,000,000,000 stars with intelligent life per week.
Re:ein minuten bitte (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:skeptical (Score:2, Insightful)
His story might not be *true*, but.. um.. there's still the crater in the ground. I don't know how he would have been able to fake that. And the rock is reportedly actually from space. Even harder to fake. The odds of him just happening to find this while doing something he shouldn't have been that caused a scar, and deciding to blame it on this meteorite, are probably as small as him getting hit by it.
Tough hands! (Score:4, Insightful)
The meteor bounced off his hand then made a foot-wide crater in the road? Wow! He's got tough hands!
Oh, wait... Maybe the injury to his hand was caused by a debris fragment from the road impact. That would actually make sense.
Re:Count me a skeptic (Score:5, Insightful)
If it was fast enough to leave an impact crater after hitting the ground, it would have shredded that kid's hand. I think it is more likely that the meteor hit the ground and the kid was hit with the stones and dirt that were tossed into the air.
Re:"Smitten", not "smote" (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh, the average American believes the only use for the word "smitten" is as a synonym for lovestruck, and you expect /. to get the grammar right?
Good luck.
Re:quote (Score:1, Insightful)
I have a big bag of colored shapes. I want to know how many red squares are in the bag. Here's an exact equation for that quantity:
N = T*S*R
N is the number of red squares in the bag
T is the total number of shapes in the bag
S is the fraction of the shapes that are squares (or, if you prefer, the probability of drawing a square of any color)
R is the fraction of the squares that are red (or, given that the shape drawn is a square, the probability of drawing a red square)
To the degree that T, S, and R are uncertain, N is uncertain. But the equation itself is exact.
Re:More likely shrapnel (Score:5, Insightful)
The wow factor of "It hit me then hit the ground" is also much better than "It hit the ground and a piece of ground hit me." Given a choice, I know which story I'd go with.
Re:F=M*A learn it, understand it. (Score:1, Insightful)
Few things wrong with your theory:
1. Meteorites go faster than bullets. Like... lots. The article approximated 30,000 miles/hour. That's more than a bullet.
2. Being shot is an interesting theory, but is kinda negated by the CRATER IN THE GROUND, and scientific testing on said rock proving it came from SPACE!
Re:Points for creativity (Score:1, Insightful)
[citation needed]
How comes it there are so many false assumptions about meteorites flying around here in this discussion? Reaching terminal velocity is, as others said, somewhat dependent on the initial speed, which can be quite high when talking about meteorites.
That is, meteorites only reach terminal velocity before hitting the ground if they were not too fast for this to happen. Obviously, in the case described it was way too fast to decelerate to terminal velocity.
Hm? Any-sized meteorites can "poke a hole through the atmosphere". Depending on entry angle, mass and speed they will either disintegrate completely, partly or not at all while poking.
As a side-note: The meteorite in question here was probably not pea-sized. It only became pea-sized in the end after some disintegration.
Why is it so common to bend scientific views as to suit one's own mind?
There is a crater in the street. There is a piece of metal in that crater which was confirmed to come from space. There was an eye-, ear-, and handwitness, and a loud bang (no wonder, given there's a crater). And you talk about this little pea-sized meteorite must have decelerated to terminal velocity? How comes it?
Please, if there's clear evidence contradicting your model of how things are, then your model is false and should be adjusted. Or given up entirely.