Russian Meteor Largest In a Century 196
gbrumfiel writes "A meteor that exploded over Russia's Chelyabinsk region this morning was the largest recorded object to strike the earth in more than a century, Nature reports. Infrasound data collected by a network designed to watch for nuclear weapons testing suggests that today's blast released hundreds of kilotons of energy. That would make it far more powerful than the nuclear weapon tested by North Korea just days ago, and the largest rock to strike the earth since a meteor broke up over Siberia's Tunguska river in 1908. Despite its incredible power, the rock evaded detection by astronomers. Estimates show it was likely only 15 meters across — too small to be seen by networks searching for near earth asteroids."
Today's meteor event came a day after California scientists proposed a system to vaporize asteroids that threaten Earth. Of course, the process needs to be started when the asteroid is still tens of millions of kilometers away; there's no chance to shoot down something that's already arrived.
Re:Interesting times... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pictures of fallen meteorites ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone seen pictures of pieces on the ground ?
Just check eBay. There will be more pieces on offer there, then actually fell to the ground.
Real soon.
Re:Rain of Iron and Ice (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, if it were a Stephen King novel, the ending would be terrible and not fit in with the rest of the book anyway. If Stephen King wrote the ending, it would probably involve the hand of god magically coming down and crushing the meteor or something retarded.
Screw you "The Stand". You had SUCH potential to have been an absolutely amazing book through and through.
Aaaand then he wrote the ending, aka "I don't feel like writing this book any more, fuck it, just type whatever." Just like all of his books. At least his short stories tend to be better, since they either don't "need" an end, or are too short for him to just give up towards the end.
Re:The history and current increase of meteors (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you seriously trying to extrapolate the number of meteors based on the number of observations submitted to a website facing both growing popularity and growing population of internet users?
Using similar methods, we can conclude that the population of cats has exploded exponentially in the last decade, and we should all be waist deep in cats shortly.