From (former) Doper Bad Astronomer
From here
I half-rise corrected. I maintain that an explosion is only when the boom goes inside out.
But yeah, it burned fast and boomed.
I was thinking of what would happen in Israel if this took place, out of a clear blue sky and all.
The booms reminded me of the Scud booms.
It was moving at about 44,000 miles per hour. “Look, here comes a mete… Never mind, too late.”
How many of these hit the ocean or remote area without being seen? Or are they always detected?
I bet a bunch of Russian air force generals were or will be hauled on the carpet to explain just that. basically something akin to a nuke warhead comes sailing over the rodina , creates a 500 kiloton air burst , in an area located ajacent to one of their ABM sites, and they never seen it coming.
Explain comrades or count trees.
Declan
And as far as injuries go, there would have been a lot fewer if so many people weren’t by their windows watching it when it exploded. Not that I blame them, that is where I’d have been. All in all, we got off easy.
The air raid sirens would go off, people would rush to their bomb shelters or safe rooms and the military would go on high alert, but other than that, not much. We have too many people pointing missiles at us to start firing back at random.
Beggin the OP’s pardon, but it’s a big-ass sky.
Imagine you’re standing in the middle of the Bonneville Salt Flats, and a single grain of salt is blowing through the air coming towards you at the speed of a bullet.
What do you do?
Because space is big and there are a lot of rocks out there. When we haven’t even catalogued all the large or medium sized ones, why would we see every tiny one coming?
The latest census from NASA indicates that there are still roughly 70 Near Earth Asteroids with diameters over 1000m to be found, which is 7% of the estimated total. Those are big enough to cause global catastrophes. There are tens of thousands in the 100-1000m range we don’t know about yet too, and potentially a million unfound asteroids with a diameter below 100m.
If we wanted to find and track every NEO capable of causing global or regional damage, we’d need to put more money into finding them than we are right now.
That’s easy: Because they were looking for things that came from Earth, and especially for things coming from a few specific sites on the Earth. That’s a much smaller target to watch than all of space.
Not to be pedantic, OK to be pedantic, what/how/why went boom? Honest question.
I would guess that the initial boom was almost completely kinetic energy being converted into heat. Any meteorite dust that resulted from the exp;losion was probably hot enough to combust, if it was combustible material (like iron); but that probably added very little to the initial explosion.
Not much material has been found yet, apparently- but maybe they haven’t looked in the right places. Big place, Russia.
If the object weighed 10,000 tons and exploded with the force of 300 kilotons, then only about one part in thirty of the energy in the explosion came from the chemical combustion- assuming it was as combustible as TNT.
And just how well do you think that will go over with the kremlin. Politicians are morons, they expect to have things explained to them with puppets and crayons, why would I expect that the russian variety would be any different.
Declan
Didn’t anyone here have snowball fights when they were kids? You throw one in a high arc at your opponents, and while they’re watching that one, you nail them in the face with a speed-ball.
Same thing here with this and the asteroid. Probably some aliens probing our meteor defense…
People will not go out to see the light show? You guys are weird.
BTW, 500 KT of energy. That’s about the size of a Trident or Minuteman warhead. While the damage is quite bad, why is the city still there? It’s a good thing it is, but why?