Need some help… Wife and I are having a small fight.
Picture this, a large meteoroid enters the atmosphere and burns up as it passes at extreme speed through the sky. Real pretty meteor, but nothing but a bit of vapor when all is done.
Same picture this time. Only the meteor is larger and makes it all the way through the atmosphere. It arrives at the top of my wife’s car and is only the size of a marble. She says that it will break the windshield. I say that it will go clean through the car and when it does come to a rest there will be an explosion… a deadly explosion.
What’s the straight dope?
Fist from Olympia Washington
Hmmmmm… it’s one where you’re wife is almost right… but you are more right.
If the meteor had come crashing down, and by the time it hit were the size of a marble, I would think that it would go through the windshield, and quite possibley through the bottom of the car… but no huge explosion.
The velocity would be bled off by the passage through things… the windshield, the driver, the seat…
However, if it were… hmm… how to put it… not as dense as a solid lump of nickel-iron, it might be destroyed by the act of impacting the glass, or the driver, or the seat, etc.
She’s right onthis one. According to an AP story a meteorite 3 ounces in weight and approximately 2 inches long hit a car in Minneapolis, breaking a windshield. It mentions nothing about the car being destroyed or the meteorite passing through the floor of the car.
Looks like a broken windshield is about the worst of it, for a metorite that size.
Your wife is right - by the time the meteorite reaches the ground, it’s slowed to whatever its terminal velocity is, where the upwards force of the wind resistance balances the weight of the rock. For that size of a rock, that’s not real high.
There have been meteorites that do more serious damage to cars, but those were larger. In either case, it’s equivalent to someone dropping it out of an airplane. With a big rock, this will smash the car pretty good.
There’s some links in the above text that didn’t copy.
Note that the effect of the meteorite depends on its size. The 12 Kg Peekskill rock smashed all the way through the trunk while the smaller 325 gram stone came to rest on top of a trunk.
At the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, they have a meteorite which landed in someones car sometime in the early 1900’s. It went through a garage roof, the roof of the car, and got embedded in the springs in the seat. They had the seat there, and the meteorite itself, which was about as big as my fist. the surface was more-or-less smooth, so I don’t think this one broke up at all when it hit.
I would expect that whether a meteorite will explode, shatter, or stay in one piece, depends at least partly on its composition. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the composition of this meteorite.
Sorry Man, Looks like your wife is right. As the meteor passes through the asmosphere, it will be severly slowed down by friction until it was travelling at only a few hundred Km/h. At this speed, it would make a good dent in the car, or break the window, but it would have to be much larger to actually pass right through the car and impact the ground hard enough to explode. Something on the order of thousands of km/hour. A meteor the size of a marble cannot go fast enough to do this though. You need a much larger and faster one.
Now there are two types of Meteors: Metallic and rocky. Metallic ones survive the trip through the atmosphere much better than rocky ones do, which tend to blow up in the air due to the pressure changes. The rock breaks up from the shock of entering the atmosphere, whick gives it more surface area causing an even faster breakup until it finally explodes.