I know what an asteroid is, and all definitions state that a meteoroid is a smaller piece from an asteroid, comet or other body.
If a meteor is a meteoroid that enters Earth’s atmosphere, and a meteorite is one that survives and falls to earth, what would one call an asteroid that did so?
Is it essentially guaranteed that because of its size, any asteroid entering the atmosphere is automatically an aster-ite?
The rock that supposedly killed off the dinosaurs was a meteorite, as was Tunguska. Has an asterite ever hit the planet? I think that one of Cecil’s articles said that it would be extremely difficult to bust up the Earth, but could such an impact create another moon?
I’m sure someone will correct me, but I believe an asteroid is called so by virtue of being in the asteroid belt.
A meteor is an object that enters the Earth’s atmosphere. A meteorite is the remains of a meteor that makes it to the surface of the Earth.
Impactor may be the appropriate term.
Everything that I read made a clear distinction between an asteroid and meteoroid. They all defined an asteroid as a large rock that orbited the sun rather than saying an object from the asteroid belt. Meteoroids were generally described as chunks of an asteroid or comet.
[ul]
[li]The Wikipedia article for meteoroid says “A meteoroid is a sand- to boulder-sized particle of debris in the Solar System”. [/li]
[li]The linked Wikipedia article for impactor states that “Objects with a diameter less than 1 m (3.3 ft) are called meteoroids”[/li][/ul]
What confused me is that both are referred to as meteorites in popular media. I see from the link that Tunguska was an impactor and not a meteorite. Thinking that we had never been struck by anything larger than a meteorite, I pondered the destructive impact of such an event. Now I have a greater understanding of the terms and their misuse.
I’m still not clear on the term for an asteroid that strikes earth atmosphere (the equivalent of meteor), but as I said earlier, they’re big enough that all of them reach earth and so I guess they are all impactors.
The Tunguska event was an airburst without an earth impact (the body may have been a comet as opposed to an asteroid).
Large bodies that enter and then exit the atmosphere are called Earth Grazers.
Thanks, this thread has been very helpful to me. I felt that I had a good understanding of what the various terms were and what interactions they were describing. With infrequent use and incorrect media references my presumed knowledge had deteriorated to the point that I wasn’t sure if I had all of the words right. Sort of like not remembering whether a formation was a stalagmite or stalactite.
“When the mice go up, the tights go down.”
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