In the meantime, I saw on Reddit that the Omaha area had a similar experience earlier today, although it doesn’t look like anybody saw anything.
This looks like a good candidate.
Here’s a bigger piece found by meteorite collector Roberto Vargas. Confirms that the fuzzier Reddit photos (from a random civilian) are what I suspected it to be, not only a meteorite but a rare type: an achondrite, maybe a Eucrite.
(By weird coincidence, the recent one in Germany was also an achondrote, likely a Eucrite.)
(The HED group of meteorite types, for Howardrites, Eucrites, and Diogenites, are from the asteroid Vesta.)
Is that a coincidence, or does their similarity and commonality in time suggest they’re part of the same swarm and perhaps the same formation event umpteen million years ago?
I know I don’t know, but good bet you’ve got more topic-relevant knowledge than I do.
March in Ohio.
Bigfoot, 75 degrees, meteor, Afroman.
Whats next?
In the 10 days between falls, Earth has moved around 10 degrees and 16 million miles further around it’s orbit, so it would have had to be a pretty wide swarm.
Having said that, they likely DID ultimately come from the same impact event, but as you said, they have been orbiting the sun for umpteen million years, so it is still a pretty big coincidence that two hit the Earth less than two weeks apart.
It is thought that the method of transport from Vesta to Earth is as follows:[8]
An impact on Vesta ejected debris, creating small (10 kilometres (6.2 mi) diameter or less) V-type asteroids. Either the asteroidal chunks were ejected as such, or were formed from smaller debris. Some of these small asteroids formed the Vesta family, while others were scattered somewhat further.[9] This event is thought to have happened less than 1 billion years ago.[10] There is an enormous impact crater on Vesta covering much of the southern hemisphere which is the best candidate for the site of this impact. The amount of rock that was excavated there is many times more than enough to account for all known V-type asteroids.
Some of the more far-flung asteroid debris ended up in the 3:1 Kirkwood gap. This is an unstable region due to strong perturbations by Jupiter, and asteroids that end up here get ejected into very different orbits on a timescale of about 100 million years. Some of these bodies are perturbed into near-Earth orbits forming the small V-type near-Earth asteroids such as e.g. 3551 Verenia, 3908 Nyx, or 4055 Magellan.
Later, smaller impacts on these near-Earth objects dislodged rock-sized meteorites, some of which later struck Earth. On the basis of cosmic ray exposure measurements, it is thought that most HED meteorites arose from several distinct impact events of this kind, and spent from about 6 million to 73 million years in space before striking the Earth.[11]
Thank you. Far more learning than I was expecting, but I’m eager for all of it.
Was it really an “asteroid”, though? Isn’t it a “meteor”?
There doesn’t seem to be a hard definition for an asteroid. However, Wikipedia says that the next smallest class of orbiting object, a meteoroid, is up to a metre in diameter.
Since this object was about twice as large as that, it was too large to be called a meteoroid (by the wiki definition, if we can trust that) so could be called an asteroid. When it hit the Earth’s atmosphere it became a meteor, a bright one that would probably be classed as a bolide or a fireball; any fragments that hit the ground are meteorites, which is a kind of rock.
As this is the Straight Dope I’d be interested if Darren Garrison (or anyone else) has a more specific definition and lower limit for asteroid size.
Yes, it was really an asteroid. An asteroid is a chunk of rock orbiting the sun. A meteor is the bright trail created by an asteroid intersecting the Earth’s atmosphere. A meteorite is an asteroid that reached the ground. (A comet is a wet rock orbiting the sun. A piece of one produces a meteor, but not usually meteorites.)
I mean, it is all nitpicking. You can call pieces of a mountain that broke off a boulder, a cobble, or a pebble depending on size, but they are all pieces of the mountain. Whether the rock in space is one centimeter, one meter, or 100 meters, it still came off an asteroid.
God is throwing rocks at Cleveland.
Therefore, God hates Cleveland.
So say we all.
Some incredible pieces are being found. This one was found by another random civilian. Highly oriented and looks similar to an Australian button tektite.
Here’s another found by Roberta Vargas.
Both of these, because of their appearance, not their type, are worth thousands. Top of the top world-class quality, and museum-grade.
Here’s a nice interview with the guy who found this one.
That “COVID virus” rock is quite cool, although it probably wasn’t when it landed.
ISTR that when this happened in Pennsylvania in 1992, a chunk of it damaged a young woman’s car so badly that it had to be totaled, but even if her insurance company hadn’t reimbursed her, a museum paid enough for the meteorite, and the car too, to more than cover the expenses.
(BTW, meteorites that strike a human-built artifact is called a hammer stone.)
Speaking of hammer stones, the most recent meteorite to fall through a house was in Texas seven hours ago.
We have another one?!?!?
Yes, this afternoon.
Shockingly good news video of the meteorite. (Usually news reports are 55 seconds of people talking and 5 seconds of the meteorite seen from a distance.)