How can a meteor impact cause these Peruvian villagers to become ill?
Link to News Story
This is a serious inquiry, but for the lighter side of this story try [thread=436980]this thread[/thread].
Radiation? Toxic substance? Microscopic alien pathogen? Interplanetary biological warfare?
I’m going to guess that some kind of gas was released, more likely from a pocket in the ground than by the meteorite itself. The villagers did report a strange smell.
Or possibly even more likely, mass hysteria and placebo effects are causing panic over absolutely nothing, and people are imagining these symptoms.
Haven’t you ever read “The Colour Out Of Space” by H. P. Lovecraft? This short story explains it all.
The crater is 100 feet wide and 20 feet deep? Is that big for a meteor (meteorite?) impact? How big of a rock would produce a crater that size?
The best known crater is the Barringer crater, in AZ.
It is about 1,200 m (4,000 ft) in diameter, about 170 m (570ft) deep.
appleciders hypothesis is likely correct. Either one.
Yeah, I know about the Berringer Crater (I’ve even been to it) but I guess I didn’t phrase my question very well. I know there have been large impacts in the (relatively) distant past but I have not heard of any “recent” impacts that produced any type of sizable crater. I seem to remember things like seeing photos where someone has found a meteorite in a field and they are showing something softball sized and a crater only a foot or two across. I also know that rocks of various sizes land all the time. I guess what I am trying to find out is if something that would produce a 100 foot crater is bigger than “normal” and, if so, how much bigger.
Here is a calculator program from this site that estimates the size of the meteor where you need more info about the meteor than just the crater dimensions. For S&G, I assumed a few parameters that are average in nature and ended up with:
So, educated guess…about 1/3 meter in diameter…assuming it’s spherical in nature and with all those other WAG parameters I assumed.
There is no normal. Meteorites are sized on what I believe is a reverse exponential scale (i.e. asymptotic on the left to the y-axis and asymptotic on the right to the x-axis). There are huge numbers of microscopic particles, large numbers of dust-sized particles, and increasingly fewer larger ones. The smaller ones hit every day. The larger ones hit on a decreasing average frequency: once every year, every 10 years, every 100 years, … every 100,000,000 years. The averages are somewhat skewed by bands of broken up meteorites and comets. And of course, on average three-quarters of these will hit the ocean and not land.
How large a meteorite would it take to make this crater? Not large, I would think. Maybe 1-10 meters in diameter would do it depending on composition. There’s plenty of evidence of recent activity that size. It’s just that very little of it hits an inhabited area.
The link I found has it as " When farmers went to investigate, however, they found a crater at least 10m wide and 5m deep, but no sign of wreckage."
So theres some variation in crater size occurring with reports, thats like 30 feet across and 15 feet deep. Has a picture of the ‘impact’ too. Im not an expert but it looks a bit funny to me.
Article here explaining why its all a bit suspect:
Otara
I read this as The Colon Out of Space
Which would explain why the villagers were getting sick if HP Lovecraft’s colon was involved.
I for one welcome our new meteorite-hurling overlords.
Interesting. I had somehow assumed that a meteorite that would make a 100 foot crater would be larger than that. I guess I wasn’t taking into account how fast it would be moving. Thanks.
And looking at the photo in Otara’s link I think the 100 foot number is well off anyway; it looks more like 10 feet to me.
Is it possible that it isn’t even a crater? Maybe they saw a meteor break up and the “crater” is just a hot spring or vent or something that just happened to be in the same area. Is that area of Peru geologically active?
Wouldn’t a nickel-iron meteoroid transfer the heat of entry to its core faster than a stony one?
What if the angle of impact was closer to 90 degrees? Peru is close to the equator.
This is interesting. The last line from an ABC News report:
The core of any meteoroid is near absolute zero for billions of years…it would take much more than atmospherical friction to heat the core…what usually happens is that the exposed surface of the meteor heats up while the interior remains virtually unchanged until impact, or it fractures into smaller pieces…but still, it remains very cold. Another explanation here.
As for your other question…
Now that size of crater seems closer to what see in the picture. As for Peru being closer to the equator, that’s true, but it does not play a factor with respect to the entry angle of a meteor. Any sporadic meteor can come from any direction in space and will enter the atmosphere a virtually any entry angle.
My WAG is that the meteor punctured an underground sulpher spring and the spring filled up part of the crater.
My WAG is something volcanic, on a small scale. The BBC web site’s report quoted people talking about a smelly gas coming out of the crater. Peru is plagued by earthquakes–just last month a coastal quake killed over 500 people–so volcanic activity is not out of the question.
Deadly gases from volcanic activity have precedent, too. Google “Lake Nyos” for a particularly bad case. I don’t know of any precedent for deadly gases or other excretions from meteorites, outside of movies.
Volcanoes have even been known to emit methane, which if ignited could create a fireball, which might give the impression of a meteorite landing. Has anyone actually found any meteorite fragments?
A follow-up article has a bunch of scientist types doubting a meteor is the cause of the sickness. (Pretty much saying what people here have been saying.)