At least it doesn’t seem to be an April Fool’s joke, if the Times and the Daily Telegraph picked it up.
Remembering that momentum is mass times velocity, if the asteroid’s vertical downward speed was, say, only a few hundred kph and not thousands of kph, the relatively minor destruction might be what we would expect.
However, it’s not clear to me how this Sumerian observed an asteroid piece coming from Austria and striking in present-day Israel, when he or she was presumably in Sumer, somewhat southeastwards, and beyond the point of impact.
I think they meant that the path of destruction left by the asteroid as it passed close to the ground would have been about a million square kilometres, then you get the impact.
Well, according to all the articles, they didn’t. They allegedly noted down details of a bright object moving across the night sky on a trajectory that, if the boffins have understood things correctly, would result in it coming to earth in Austria. That bit seems perfectly reasonable. With regard to the 1KT explosion number - since total and utter ineptitude is quite common in UK journalism, a number of zeros may be missing from that number, or it may simply have been pulled from someone’s arse. Interestingly, neither the press release or Bristol University microsite related to the boffinry in question mentions of the size of the explosion.
What I have trouble with is the idea of a blast plume arching backwards from Austria to Israel - that seems a bit of a stretch. But I guess if we want to know more about their theories, we’ll have to invest in
which is being pimped energetically by the boffins.
Damn, missed the edit window. I wanted to add that as regards the size of the tablet, it’s quite blatantly six INCHES across, not six centimetres. Make your judgements on the quality of the Times article accordingly.
I suppose it’s as plausible as any cobbled-together account of something that may have happened thousands of years ago. One part bothers me. That’s the idea that these things happen every 7000 years or so, and we’re due for another. Is some asteroid out there muttering, “Oh, man, I’m supposed to crash into Earth, and I’m 835 years late”? :dubious:
