Meterorite chunk crashes into house, bedroom, pillow | Hacker News Reader

Meterorite chunk crashes into house, bedroom, pillow

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433 pointswalrus01243 comments

Reminds me of this story which is apparently is one of the most famous meteorite incidents, being filmed by 16 angles in 1992, across multiple US states before smashing into a cherry red Chevy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peekskill_meteorite

This was a noteable Wikipedia story recently (maybe coincidently).

The weirdest thing about this story for me is a 17 year old who owns a car. That's just really bizarre to me.

sounds like a locality thing. I owned a personal car at 16, like many other mid-west US people.

Where I grew up, most 17 year olds had cars. You can't exist without a car in the suburbs, and as soon as you can drive, you get one. Opens up a lot of employment opportunities, and not having one used to be a social death sentence, although these days kids are probably too busy on their phones to even realize they've turned 17.

cars were a lot more mandatory in those days since the hills went upwards both ways

I actually did have to go uphill both ways to school! My parents house was next to a school at the top of a hill but there was a fence that blocked the most direct route through someone's yard. I had to go all the way down, around and back up.

Chiming in to add - also very common in urban Southern California.

Fairly common where I grew up in rural new hampshire. Buying a car would often be the first thing you'd do after working for a year or two. Otherwise, you'd need to borrow a car, or bum rides to get anywhere.

I bought my first car before I even had a driver's license... It cost $250 and needed a rebuilt engine. (IL)

Before Cash for Clunkers there were plenty of sub-$1000, perfectly serviceable cars. A college classmate drove a $400 car and it never gave him problems.

Where I grew up in the UK in the 1990’s. The insurance cost was £1250 per year to insure me when I was 17, Which was about $2500 USD at the time. So I didn’t have a car. My insurance is ~£200 per year now…

Might be weird for most of the world outside the US. Pretty normal/par for the course in the US.

Where do you live? Atleast in the US, having a car as a teenager is (was? I'm 28) the norm

I knew teenagers driving cars was a thing in the US but I assumed they were driving their parents' cars. How do they afford it? I still don't own a car because I don't need one where I live.

Same way they can afford anything else - Either they work to earn money pay for it or their parents pay for it.

My first car was $500, my second was $200. You buy used and old. Myself and most of my friends were willing to work on them ourselves for minor repairs that were needed. Lots of kids got hand me downs as their parents bought themselves a new car. There were lots of cheap clunkers to be had back in the day. No idea what the used market looks like these days though…

Watch American Graffiti - high-school kids driving around in neat hot-rods.

How is that weird? Even today you can buy a piece of junk car for like 1000 dollars. A lot of parents buy their children cars too.

> cherry red Chevy

That's probably one of the most unique insurance claims in history.

Unfortunately I'm pretty sure this would fall under acts of God and therefore wouldn't be covered.

Sometimes I wonder why we pay for insurance (to cover unpredictable accidents) when insurance policies specifically don't cover many unpredictable accidents...

Because it covers a lot of other accidents that are predictable.

If it's predictable it's an (expensive) pre-payment plan. Perhaps you mean it's characterizable.

Predictable yet unlikely events (especially expensive) are what insurance is optimally for.

Exactly. It's unlikely to happen to you personally, but it's certain to happen to some proportion of the whole population in a given time period. That's what makes meteorites different - they're unlikely to happen even to the population as a whole.

So it makes perfect sense to cover them.

There has been (one, perhaps two?) cases of damage to car by meteorite in the last decade, in the same period there have been billions of insurance policies issued. The per insurance policy cost is negligible.

Not necessarily. My home insurance (with outdoor coverage) has an add-on policy that also covers damage away from the house up to €3000 per event, for €12 a month with a €100 deductible.

That means I don’t need any separate insurance for my laptop, phone, headphones, watch, what have you. And if just one of those breaks in the span of 3 years, I’ve already broken even at worst, or a net €2570 ‘gain’ at best.

I need to rewatch the film The Man Who Sued God, which tackles this particular thing (I believe it was based on a real story?). The tl;dr is, a guy's boat was hit by lightning and the insurance didn't pay out because it was "Act of God", or in more agnostic terms, unpredictable / unexpected.

Interesting, I saw a Bollywood film with that premise - can't recall the name but I think more recent - not a boat, but the guy's shop. Was good from what I recall, would also recommend.

(edit: though in hindsight I realise that's a useless 'recommendation' if I can't recall the name...)

OMG: Oh My God! (2012) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2283748/

That's the one, thanks!

You don't insurance to protect the car, you get insurance to protect yourself, i.e., liability.

If you do an oopsy, and someone dies or even ends up in a wheelchair, how are you going to pay for the resulting lawsuit otherwise? Covering repairs is just an added bonus on top of the CYA.

Also consider if you end up in a wheelchair or quadriplegic: what happens if the person who hit you is a deadbeat driving around without insurance? Do you think you'll be able to extract anything out of them with a standard lawsuit?

Do you have general life insurance with critical illness coverage? Do you have any kind of income replacement policy?

* https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/01041...

>You don't insurance to protect the car, you get insurance to protect yourself, i.e., liability.

More to the point, your (liability) car insurance is to protect the other person

Your (liability) car insurance is to protect your financial situation by paying the other person.

In many jurisdictions (e.g. the USA) coverage against theft and damage is separate and can be omitted. Liability insurance is usually mandatory by law. So I think people tend to view them as separate and different to some extent.

It's apparently (based on an anecdote of 1 - further research appreciated) very straightforward to get meteorite coverage on your insurance - just ask for it and you'll get it added at no extra cost. I have no idea why it is that this one rare event is so straightforward, but I have a friend who gets it added to every policy he purchases and he's never had any resistance.

I can see why it might be free for a conventional policy, but surely it can't be free for an arbitrarily large policy? An interesting case of rounding working out in your favor if true.

I do think large properties - stadiums, skyscrapers, etc - fall into their own weird category when it comes to insurance.

I mean, what happened with the twin towers and the other affected buildings, not to mention the tens of thousands of people that died or were injured as a consequence, in terms of insurance?

IIRC, this turned into a large and complicated reinsurance claim case because they couldn't work out if the second plane hitting counted as a separate event, or if both planes should be counted as the same attack. This made a big difference in terms of who should pay whom, and what amount.

> if both planes should be counted as the same attack.

Why would it be counted as a same attack, two planes hit two seperate buildings so they are two separate events.

Why (or indeed why not) it would be counted as the same attack is exactly the point of the case I described.

Must be hard for insurance brokers to add meteorite coverage and keep a straight face.

Who needs insurance?

> [Michelle] Knapp had just purchased the car for $300. Immediately following the extraterrestrial impact, the vehicle was sold to Iris Lang, wife of renowned meteorite collector and dealer Al Lang, for $25,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peekskill_meteorite#Specimens

Luckily, this wasn't an issue - the owner sold the car to collectors for something like 100 times its pre-impact value, and the stone itself for twice that. I trust she got a nicer car with the money.

I mean being able to sell a damaged car - does that mean you don't get the insurance claim?

Probably but, but at that point any insurance payout would be a rounding error

I don't know if this is universal, but an insurance won't pay out until a repair has been done and invoiced by a verified garage.

I mean I've had some damage early this year, a guy backed up into our car on a parking lot (his back window was misted and he didn't look properly or respond to the horn), after checking in with the insurance we took it to the garage and everything was handled after that.

ok, since never had a car I wasn't sure.

Not 100% true, FWIW. I've had scenarios, even recently, where our insurance offered two options: 1) Take it to an approved shop for a full repair 2) They send a check for the estimated repair value to me, and I do whatever I want, which could including pocketing the money and living with the damage.

Granted, "living with the damage" would probably not be feasible in a meteor impact scenario, but for lesser damage it can work.

Can confirm. I've gotten insurance payouts and then not repaired the car because it was cosmetic. Perfectly legal.

According to Wikipedia, the 17 year old boy that shortly before the event bought the car for $300 sold it for $25000. I don't think he cried himself to sleep.

17 year old girl https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/06/the-meteorite-that-cra...

If you go to the wiki they have a photo of the car in a museum in Paris. Beautiful classic car too.

There's an exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago about another meteorite that smashed through a garage and ended up in the back(?) seat of a car. I think this was in the 20s or 30s.

Are you sure it wasn't a green Chevy?

https://youtu.be/PqEztDtxWBY

> The Peekskill meteorite is estimated to be 4.4 billion years old.

If everything in the universe is the same age (emerging from the big bang), is 4.4 billion years the last time the meteorite had a serious physical transformation (to it’s current form)? If not, what is meant with 4.4 billion years old?

Yes, in the same way your car might be 5 years old the age refers to the time the object was formed not the age of the matter/energy in it.

It means it was formed right along with the rest of the planets. The sun is not a first generation star, that's why we have all those heavy elements here out of which more complex constructs are made. So not everything is 'the same age'.

To make this more precise, it refers to the nuclear transformation of elements.

The same way it makes more sense to celebrate when a person was born[1] than to celebrate when the atoms of their body was formed.

[1] Regardless of https://youtu.be/T5f8WoV0zbQ

I wonder if there is any culture out there that celebrates "conception day" as opposed to birthday.

Interesting thought.

I'm not at all into the proper side of science, but one thing that strikes me is that since conception doesn't have to lead to a child being born [1], celebrating the final more obvious "success case" makes more sense to me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage

I previously thought Korea worked this way bit it seems it's a lot more puzzling than I thought.

https://overseas.mofa.go.kr/no-en/brd/m_21237/view.do?seq=33....

It sure would make some things more convenient.

My daughter arrived 10 weeks premature and with her being only 16 months old now since birth, whenever we’re asked her age it’s normally for people to compare her progress developmentally and we have to do a quick calculation in our heads.

It made me realise that date of birth is not especially significant compared to date of conception.

Fortune as time goes on it will matter less.

Those 10 weeks don’t mean much later in life though. One is really only occupied by ones child’s development on a weekly basis for a year or so. Enjoy it, even if you have to do more math than usual.

Who wants to think about their conception?

*shudders*

See if I invite you to my 4.4 billionth birthday party

A meteorite is "formed" when disparate elements in gaseous form coalesce into solid masses, which then accrue into a larger solid mass. Larger objects will undergo further processes, such as gravitational differentiation (forming layers of denser materials nearer the core) and become more spherical (again, due to gravity).

The actual process from gas to final rock takes a much shorter time of span than has passed since it occurred. Thus, we can say that the whole process happened 4.4 billion years ago without there being much importance to e.g. the gas coalescing into microscopic grains 4.4832 billion years ago and the near-final shape of the object being established 4.3681 billion years ago.

Its was flung out of a exploding sun.. so the radioactive decay of the supernova material started 4.4 billion years ago?

Thats 19,130434783 galactic years.. so in theory that sort of debris once caught could come from anywhere in the galaxy we tumbled through

The meteor was not flung out of an exploding sun. The elements that would later form the metor - iron for instance - were flung out of an exploding sun. This likely happened far earlier than the 4.4 billion year age of the rock. Considering _that sun_ was itself a second population sun, that event probably happened closer to 6 to 8 billion years ago (personal estimate based on the lifetime of third- and second- population stars and the estimated age of the universe).

And it wasn't solid iron at that point, rather disperse iron atoms.

videos: https://meteoritecar.com/gallery/

I think the most intriguing aspect of this report is the dog somehow sensed this meteorite was on its way.

"she awoke to the sound of her dog barking, giving her a moment's notice before a rock from outer space hurtled into her bedroom."

Perhaps another piece fell nearby just before this one.

Maybe a rock hurtling at terminal velocity straight towards your head (approximately) makes some interesting high frequency sound waves that only dogs can hear?

No, they wouldn't. Sound travels at the speed of sound. That speed is the same regardless of the frequency (although it varies by temperature and air pressure). Supersonic things travel faster than sounds.

You could get around this by, say, making the air itself move directly towards the person nearly as quickly as the meteor, but that is probably safe to exclude as a possibility.

There is also Doppler effect, and dogs are known to be able to hear ultrasound.

Doppler effect doesn't allow sound go to faster than the speed of sound.

Dogs can indeed hear ultrasonic frequencies, but ultrasonic frequencies of sound, being sounds, travel at the speed of sound. Things that travel faster than the speed of sound go faster than sounds.

Did you see the picture and get the impression that the rock was traveling at supersonic velocities? Really?

Are you being serious? It's a known fact that meteorites travel many many times faster than sound!

When they enter the atmosphere, yes, but not when they reach the surface of the earth. Any rock-like object below ~15 m in size will reach terminal velocity before hitting the ground.

But this object was not traveling at supersonic speeds when it hit the house. Meteorites below a certain size slow down to terminal velocity long before they reach the surface.

Dogs definitely have some sort of “sixth sense” or are very attuned to the environment.

Tons of reports of dogs waking their humans prior to impending but hard to detect dangers such as earthquakes…

In the case of earthquakes, dogs can detect compression waves which travel faster than the stronger and more destructive transverse waves. In the case of a meteorite it is harder to imagine a plausible mechanism. As most meteorites are supersonic, it's not possible for any waves to arrive at their destination before they do.

[UPDATE] Reading some of the other comments it occurred to me that this particular meteorite was probably traveling at terminal velocity, and was thus sub-sonic. So it's possible a dog could hear its approach.

i wonder if the rock was magnetic

The one time I was in a noticeable earthquake in California, this is what happened: all the dogs in the neighborhood started barking at the same time. a couple seconds later, all the car alarms went off. a couple seconds after that, there was a huge JOLT and then gentle decaying shaking.

> "But the workers had seen a meteorite, or a falling star, explode and there was a couple of booms"

Dogs don't really like 'booms'.

The rock would have been there before the dog would be able to hear the boom. More likely explanation: there was a bright flash in the sky, and the dog saw this.

It would have been falling at terminal velocity at that point, which would have been subsonic (200 to 400 mph)

https://www.amsmeteors.org/fireballs/faqf/#12

Possibly, but the rock also came to rest on the mattress and not underneath her basement so there’s a possibility that it was already sub-sonic and that the dog had a chance to hear it before it arrived.

@jcims terminal velocity only applies to something in free fall, not to something with a high magnitude inertial vector relative to the Earth (like a meteorite), or anything with thrust (like a supersonic plane or a bullet).

I think @krona's got the right answer.

It will slow and eventually reach terminal velocity. I don't know if it has enough time/distance to do that before hitting the earth but given the small size I wouldn't be surprised.

> velocity only applies to something in free fall, not to something with a high magnitude inertial vector relative to the Earth (like a meteorite)

It could be conceivably coming at a speed high enough to still be supersonic when it hit the ground. However, were that the case, I doubt there would be still much of a house remaining. Or maybe a block for that matter, depending on how fast it was going.

More likely, it just slowed down due to friction. This is even more likely for a small rock.

> anything with thrust (like a supersonic plane or a bullet).

Plane has thrust, but a bullet doesn't ;)

Initial velocity doesn't matter (outside of relativistic considerations) for whether an object makes it through the atmosphere. Density and size do.

“…an object forced to move faster than its terminal velocity will, upon release, slow down to this constant velocity.”

https://www.britannica.com/science/terminal-velocity

IIUC, the meteorite was forced or “released” into its “high magnitude inertial vector” initially, and would continue to decelerate as it approached to the surface… whether it did much of that on the way down is a different story!

A lot depends on the initial velocity and angle of impact.

Considering that the earths atmosphere isn’t much more than 100km thick, and a meteor could in theory come in head-on with an initial velocity of 70km per second, there isn’t going to much time for it to slow down.

70km/s is interstellar material

Based on some quick googling (not an expert in the related physics like some sibling commenters seem to be), earth’s orbital velocity around the sun is ~30km/s and the sun’s orbital velocity around the center of the galaxy is 250km/s

Air resistance is to first approximation quadratic with velocity. High initial velocities lead to very high braking force, so it wouldn't have 70 km/s for very long. Also see surrounding comments for more related physics.

Actually, Newton's impact depth equation tells you that an unpowered object generally won't sustain high velocity beyond a certain distance when impacting into something (in this case the atmosphere):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth

In this case, the ratio of densities is maybe 2000, so without gravity the meteor would expend all its initial kinetic energy after traveling 2000 times its diameter through the atmosphere. That's less than 1 kilometer. Hence, it will reach terminal velocity long before hitting the surface. (See also the Meteorite part in the wiki article).

It must have slowed down to almost nothing by whatever means, or it wouldn't have landed softly on a pillow, but obliterated the bedroom. Or the entire house. Or the entire neighborhood.

I'm gonna guess it's pretty low-density, and either entered the atmosphere at a very shallow angle, or is a chunk that fell off a larger piece somewhere close to the ground, and most of the energy was absorbed by the roof.

Even more likely explanation: the dog was always barking at night, but she was so used to it she stopped noticing it, until now when she connected it to the meteorite.

Dogs are really amazing animals and we are super lucky that they love us. They will clean up any food you spill, the alert you to danger, they will fight off bears or other attackers.

They can smell cancer, covid19 and contraband. Just simply amazing animals.

> contraband Some people don’t like the narc dogs.

bacon in my pockets usually manages it, just give it to the dog when he gets interested.

airport staff usually hate it, but you can always play dumb and be like "doggie was hungry"

It’s not luck, though, right? They are man-made; selectively bred to cooperate with and have affection for humans.

It’s lucky that our ancestors selectively bred them so that we get to benefit from them today.

It's lucky that there were innate characteristics in dogs' ancestral species, which allowed for their domestication.

Tail-wagging in juvenile wolves and foxes was selected for in adult dogs. Their acutely sensitive hearing and olfactory sense complements our eyes etc.

I consider it a matter of mutual respect. Early humans and dogs are both pack hunters and likely stalked the same prey.

I figure dogs were pretty impressed with our take-downs and were glad to share the spoils, and vice versa. Throw in a warm fire and you got yourself a friend.

Of course, they were wolves at the time. It must have been quite an interesting relationship.

I like to think humans stole the pups or took the abandoned ones.

It was and still is possible to domesticate wolves. They are harder to train but it is perfectly possible [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolves_as_pets_and_working_ani...

domesticating dogs refers to multigenerational breeding and selecting for genetic traits.

in the sense of domesticating meaning training, I wouldn't call what you can do with a wolf "perfect". Don't leave the baby alone with them.

I guess people sometimes say “domesticate” when they mean “tame”.

yeah, but we are in a thread talking about our ancestors domesticating dogs originally

True, I should have said "taming" but my comment was a reply to "It must have been quite an interesting relationship", so it is still relevant.

Saw this [0] on HN a couple months ago, which could hint at how it started.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28272893

> They will clean up any food you spill

I don't think they are cleaning, but eating that food.

> the alert you to danger

They alert when they are scared and looking for your help.

> they will fight off bears or other attackers

Not really. Some trained breeds are powerful enough. But smaller and non-trained dogs will run for their lives.

> They can smell cancer, covid19 and contraband.

No. They can be trained to smell them, though. They just happen to have a strong sense of smell like many other animals.

> I don't think they are cleaning, but eating that food.

Still helpful

> They alert when they are scared and looking for your help.

Never owned a guard dog, I see. My dog has almost zero reason to be scared of anything, she's massive and strong. She lets me know when anything suspicious happens nearby

> Not really. Some trained breeds are powerful enough. But smaller and non-trained dogs will run for their lives.

Well, obviously. My Pyr can take a small bear, or at least her dad did with no problem.

> No. They can be trained to smell them, though.

They can already smell them, they can be trained to alert us to those smells.

Do you just not like dogs?

> Do you just not like dogs?

No, I have a dog and had dogs since ~10. I just don't have that emotional attachment that makes me see them as these amazing fairy-tale creatures. They are just animals with a human bond.

Also a huge dog doesn't make me feel any safe. Unless you are living in a jungle or war is breaking out in your neighborhood, you don't need a massive dog that can take a bear. Some dog breads are too powerful and can hurt real humans. These are still animals after all and can be unpredictable and harm others[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_dog_attacks_in_t...

You aren't a dog person, understandable.

The bond can get very strong, and pairing that effect with a dog's unique ability to read human intent and emotion can lead to a very strong relationship.

You're generalizing very strongly here. Many large dog breeds are LGDs, which are generally non-aggressive, to say the least. The most common dog injuries are from Pitbulls and Rottweilers, which have unique temperaments and aren't particularly large.

I live in a poor suburban area. My large dog is an active deterrent to would-be criminals, and she's very gentle and lazy. Based on your verbiage, I'd assume you'd prefer I have a special license to own her?

Alerting is useful regardless of the dog's motivation.

However my dog is definitely not alerting solely out of fear. He can be aggressive towards strangers in certain situations, and I'm totally confident he would confront an intruder. Though alerting is already enough to warn them and warn us too, even if he didn't.

> clean up any food you spill

Except that half of what we eat and drink is toxic to dogs. Our job is to block the dogs natural tendency to kill themselves. A true symbiotic relationship.

Plenty of what we eat isn’t that great for us either.

Humans are complex critters.

Not really. We just eat everything.

A hyper intelligent race of vultures might consider us sensitive eaters for avoiding carrion.

Those silly apes leaving good food on the ground! That's quality aged meat!

There was an audible explosion and what fell through the roof was likely a fragment that fell far less than the speed of sound (340 m/s vs < 100 m/s)

My hypothesis is that her dog didn't necessarily observe the meteorite, but began to bark as a response to other barking neighborhood dogs who did see the flash.

I just assumed she was remembering it out of order. A lot happened very fast and she started off asleep.

One strange aspect of this: It happened slightly before midnight. Generally speaking meteors are more common in the morning hours, between midnight and noon. Those of us between midnight and noon are on the "front" side of the planet at the earth moves around the sun. That is why most are seen in the early morning. They are still there during daylight but we are less likely to see them. After noon we are moving onto the "lee" side, the back side of the planet that gets less meteors. This one hit just before midnight, right at that line between front and back sides.

Solar midnight in Golden is currently at ~1:30 though[1], so it was even a bit more in the solar evening than the actual time would suggest.

[1]: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/canada/golden

This is.. true for artifacts entering the earth relative to the solar systems, aka meteorites that are already circling the sun at moderate speed - aka the earth on its orbit moves into them.

This does not hold for interstellar objects, which may come crashing into our spiralling course from any angle. Even for those, the likelihood for a "frontal" collision is slightly increased though.

Question: If a object comes at just the right angle.. could it essentially make a hover-touch down landing (on a planet with not much atmosphere)? As it would have not much motion relative to the planet system (okay, rotation should be very little) and gravity would add speed..

I can't see gravity perfectly canceling out forward velocity while simultaneously contacting the surface. It would have to come through the body first. Which, I suppose, is terrifyingly possible.

  > If a object comes at just the right angle.. could it essentially
  > make a hover-touch down landing (on a planet with not much atmosphere)?

No. If the object were to come into just-barely contact with the surface of an airless world, then that body would have enough velocity at that point to take it back out to its apogee. And so does the planet, for that matter. For a hover-touch down landing, the relative speeds between the objects would have to be quasi-zero, so that friction could take over to set it down. But if the relative speeds between the objects were to be quasi-zero, then that would mean that the two objects are already in very, very similar orbits. As in, the apogee of the object would coincide in space (and time) with the apogee of the planet.

Plus, when such an object that is moving so (relatively) slowly approaches the planet, it will fall into the gravity well and pick up a lot of speed - the escape velocity of the planet, which for Earth is about 11.2km/s. So effectively there is a minimum speed at which an object can touch the planet's surface, if you disregard air resistance and assume that the object came from a long way away without doing anything funky like slingshots on its way in.

Meteors that are seen in the morning are mostly cometary material that do not produce meteorites. For material from the asteroid belt there is a sampling bias: material hitting at the evening side of the Earth has a lower relative velocity and therefore a larger probability to survive the impact with the atmosphere.

The meterorite right now: https://pics.me.me/boom-headshot-angry-catzz-22408819.png

It kind of makes me wonder if my intuition about how rare meteorites are is a bit off; for one meteorite to almost hit a person, there must be many more meteorites that weren't noticed, or were never found.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event#Frequency_and_ris...

> An estimated 500 meteorites reach the surface each year, but only 5 or 6 of these typically create a weather radar signature with a strewn field large enough to be recovered and be made known to scientists.

I wonder if there are places on the sea floor with piles of these things that have accumulated over the years and for whatever reason not been buried in sediment? I suppose iron meteorites would probably rust and disintegrate; maybe some of other materials might survive.

I used to be skeptical of the idea there were any meteorites of martian origin on earth but it turns out there is copious mass exchange between planets.

Note that people routinely find meteorites just hanging out on the surface in areas like Antarctica

Solid field of white with a not-white object sitting on it vs grass, dirt, weeds, sand, etc. Doesn't quite seem fair

Yes the probability of hitting a house is low. To begin with assuming uniform sampling over the planet (asterisk here) hitting land is lower than hitting an ocean / large water body.

The asterisk here is that from my knowledge asteroid belts in the system are almost co-planar to Earth so even accounting for dispersion my expectation is that the dostribution to the Earth surface hits is not quite uniform.

But to partially answer your last question with a quick Google search: https://www.newsweek.com/meteorite-nasa-fragments-1003713?am...

Pretty common. You can probably find one in your gutters or roof.

This video says 1 per square meter per year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xD7SvtPAMM

That's really cool. I also didn't realize scanning electron microscopes were that compact.

He has a companion video about that - apparently that particular SEM is the smallest in the world, and the manufacturer loaned him one to make videos about. But he had a ton of issues with it due to being at a high altitude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t60I0Z7qCsU

It looks like an amazing channel!

For the curious, the machine in question: https://mymochii.com/

It doesn't appear to be on sale yet. And from the comments on that video, SEM does not appear to be a "toss the sample in the machine and go" process.

How could high altitude negatively affect the machine? The machine uses a vacuum pump. High altitude should help the vacuum pump work faster and better.

> for one meteorite to almost hit a person, there must be many more

There are, but "must" is not how probability works. Improbable things happen all the time without any respect for other more probable outcomes.

Except that other are not “more probable.” The probability of any horizontal four square feet getting hit by a meteorite is the same.

The empty squares are more probable because there are more of them.

There’s a wonderful passage in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry‘s memoir “Wind, Sand, and Stars” where he describes being marooned in the saharan (or is it Arabian) desert, and didn’t think much of the many small black stones speckled in the sand until night fell and he saw the steady stream of meteors falling from the sky. (If you’re in a truly dark environment, like a desert in the early days of electric light, there doesn’t even have to be a meteor shower to see a fireball every few minutes)

The description in the book elicits a sense of one-ness, that earth is not separate from the space it inhabits, but very much interacts with all the other flying rocks.

Beautiful comment. Curiously seeded by such an useless article.

It _almost_ hit a person, but didn’t. Probably many more of these than direct hits.

I just watched a talk that covered that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgJUT3C5OFg

There seem to be a lot if you count the really tiny ones: https://kottke.org/21/05/the-micrometeorites-all-around-us

Here's something fun: The Mars rovers have found multiple meteorites on Mars.

https://geology.com/articles/mars-meteorites/

Reminds me of Ringworld by Larry Niven. Early in the book, the notoriously paranoid alien is outside and stressed about the odds of being hit by a meteorite.

Well that’s a pretty big chunk. Can’t tell if it’s metal or stone but meteorites are worth a lot. She may not realize how much the meteorite is worth.

According to this site: http://www.meteorlab.com/METEORLAB2001dev/pricing.htm

Common iron meteorite prices are generally in the range of US$0.50 to US$5.00 per gram. Stone meteorites are much scarcer and priced in the US$2.00 to US$20.00 per gram range.

Fun fact: there are very few recorded incidents of a meteorite hitting a person

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylacauga_(meteorite)

I have an acquaitance who got hit; he didn't realize it until the next day, though. It was probably literally a meteorite and not a meteor.

It was during one of the showers (Leonids?). He was outside watching the show, and felt something hit his leg. He looked around the next day and found a little piece of rock that looked likely. Sent if off for analysis and it was verified as a meteorite. He thinks it bounced off the ground before it hit him, so was technically a meteorite and not a meteor.

If you get hit by one it’s a meteorite. Meteors burn up in the upper atmosphere.

For millions of years that rock was going to hit that person. Just. Waiting.

From the very beginning, you were always going to be where you're at right now.

Shhhh. Nobody wants that realization.

Eh, it's not so bad once you realize that free will can only exist due to the crushing grasp of determinism.

the whole reason we are conscious is to make executive decisions. we just don't have any choice in what those decisions will be. this is a read only universe. #fakeuniverse

Of course we have a choice, that's what determinism is for, to make choices. A choice is a necessary, consciously imposed relation between past and future. If there were multiple possible outcomes, it wouldn't be a choice because it wouldn't be in our control.

Philosophical free will is terminally confused, because it mixes up map and territory; it confuses the speculative imagined futures in our decisionmaking procedure with actually existing, physically real universes. To make a decision, we create speculative fictional mental universes conditioned on different choices we make, rank them by preference, then "decide" on the one that is the most favored. Now of course the output of that function was predetermined from the start, but we did not have access to it. So we compute it, and the process of computing it is what 'choosing' is.

The universe isn't fake, our minds are fake.

What's a gram in hogsheads again?

It's a conformability error because a gram is mass and hogshead is volume.

If the hogshead were filled with water, it would have a mass of 238480.94 grams. More if it's filled with something heavier.

What type of pillow can stop a meteorite is what I'm wondering. Sure the roof may of slowed it enough but for it to still be intact from that and at that size, it would of been dense to make it that far without breaking up or burning up and I'd of expected a more substantial roof would be needed to slow it. Then the final detail, It would still be pretty darn hot.

So I'm somewhat sceptical.

“Aww, I loosened it for ya!” - Roof

(Like the wide opening a jar of pickles her husband couldn’t)

Sounds like it may have hit the mattress before rolling between the pillows, and the photo and title are mildly sensationalizing with hitting the pillow directly.

> “…I rolled back one of the two pillows I'd been sleeping on and in between them was the meteorite."

I won't make numerical estimates here, but we can consider that:

  - the piece of meteorite had already achieved terminal velocity,

  - most of the remaining energy was lost on the collision with the layers of the roof and

  - final collision was dampened by the pillow, mattress foam and bed structure.

By the size of of the object on the photograph, if it has approximately the same density of earth stones, the story seems 100% believable.

As I understand it most meteorites, especially small ones, are cool when they hit the earth.

https://planetary.msfc.nasa.gov/Meteorites_and_Craters.html

>What type of pillow can stop a meteorite

The kind that has a roof, ceiling and maybe a few walls between it and the meteorite.

This NASA document explains very nicely how a series of thin shields can provide more protection than one much thicker shield layer. Of course, the velocity is much lower once in the atmosphere.

https://hvit.jsc.nasa.gov/shield-development/

I suspect they're trading an obscene amount of space to save weight (because space). There's a reason (the reason being they tested this stuff 1.5 centuries ago) pretty much no armored vehicle or vessel uses armor with empty spaces in between.

It’s called “spaced armor” and there’s a whole wikipedia article detailing its use in the last century of tank design.

Army wants to save weight too btw, they do fly these things in after all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_armour

Not only that, but you get better fuel efficiency, better acceleration etc.

You would be surprised: https://below-the-turret-ring.blogspot.com/2016/03/chobham-a...

Assuming meteors can have any initial size, speed, and entry angle, there must be some sets of those initial values such that a remaining meteorite of the size seen in these photos could go through a roof and land on a bed. It doesn't seem possible that there would be any step function where if it doesn't burn up completely and can make it through a roof it must be going fast enough to also go through a pillow.

I'm really kinda hoping it was a MyPillow so that my afternoon local radio ads turn into METEORITE PROTECTION

also possibly quite hot from recent interactions with the atmosphere

Roberta Sparrow predicted this in her book the Philosophy of Time Travel.

This is a Donnie Darko reference for those who don't know

I loved bullshitting about this with my friends when I was young. Probably wouldn't be nearly such an eerie and fun movie if I saw it for the first time later in life.

I think this meteor came in a glancing angle and broke up at high altitude. If it were to come straight down it would have burnt up, or done a lot more damage.

The terminal velocity of a baseball is ~95mph, a brick is ~150mph, so the meteorite must have been slowed down to around this speed before it hit the roof. It also would have had 4 min of freefall Canadian airblast to cool it off.

@dang: can you change the title? Simple typo meterorite → meteorite

Well, damn.

And here I'd thought the premise of _Donnie Darko_ was unrealistic, but here it is, with a meteorite instead of a jet engine, no less.

Someone better at stats than I am: What is the probability of getting hit in the face by a meteorite while you sleep?

Aspiring screenwriter's gotta know

Around 5e-14 per year, assuming random impact location, small (i.e. not town-sized) projectiles, and head impact cross-section the size an A4 paper.

You can sleep safely. Waiting for 10^14 years will take a while - by that time, no new stars are born in Milkomeda, and the Sun's white dwarf remnant has cooled down to a point of no longer being visible by naked eye. (edit: of course, it's not reasonable to assume that the 500 impacts / year will be constant till the end of time)

Hitting a random human on Earth, though, is a munch higher likelihood - around 0.04% per year if I did my numbers right.

thank you <3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylacauga_(meteorite)

The Sylacauga meteorite fell on November 30, 1954, at 12:46 local time (18:46 UT) in Oak Grove, Alabama, near Sylacauga. It is commonly called the Hodges meteorite because a fragment of it struck Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges (1920–1972).

I’m from Sylacauga. This is our claim to fame. All I can say is I’m glad it didn’t hit the woman from BC. Mostly because I don’t want anyone to get hurt. But I’d be lying if it weren’t a little bit about losing our bit of trivia!

Good for her - she can probably buy a house from the sale of the meteorite.

Would the rock have had enough force to kill her if she had slept on that side of the bed that night?

What a way to go, imagine there could be a rock hurling through the universe for billions of years waiting to reach its final destination by crashing into your skull and killing you as you sleep peacefully.

>Would the rock have had enough force to kill her if she had slept on that side of the bed that night?

Can a lump of iron kill you if it fell on your head from the ceiling? Yes, it can.

Yes, it will

Remindes me of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylacauga_(meteorite)

Looks like there were many sightings of this event: https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/imo_view/event/2021/6241

And her report: https://fireball.amsmeteors.org/members/imo_view/report/2455...

"This fireball hit and entered my house"

A video from the reports https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwHxuhVA_8o

Immediately thought of this[1]. This may well be the one in a billion exception, but skepticism is warranted.

[1] https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/items/what_to_do/

A nearby home security camera actually captured a short glimpse of the meteorite falling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwHxuhVA_8o

sleeping with aliens, you know, it would be kinda fun to build a defense system against asteroids. a system so precise that this rare possibility becomes even more impossible.

sure the roi on wouldn’t be anything but the idea of putting it on other planets gets my mind out there. that and i really want to build autonomous farming equipment that we can use for terraforming from other planets from afar.

you know like thinking way into the future, it’s going to happen eventually. maybe we’ll see a small portion of that

Why does the meteorite have the energy to crash through the roof of the house, but then stop on a pillow (without damage to the pillow, as far as the picture shows)?

(I'm not sure why we have this bizarrely sequential headline—surely no-one would say "crashes into house, bedroom, pillow" in conversation—when the actual headline, "Woman rocked awake by meteorite chunk crashing into her bedroom", seems (if punny) just fine. But I do like that the article leads with a picture of a meteorite sitting on a pillow. You know, as proof.)

Speak for yourself. My conversations are specific, detailed, factual.

I don't know how much stock we should put in the exact sequence of events recalled by someone who had just woken up, but it doesn't seem that implausible to me.

It's not like the meteorite would have been traveling at thousands of miles per hour. By the time it got to ground level, it would have slowed down to its terminal velocity. Some amount of energy would have been absorbed in its collision with the roof, and it wouldn't have had time to accelerate very much in the remaining fraction of a second before coming to rest on a soft surface.

By way of comparison, I can easily imagine a dropped bowling ball going through a roof but not doing much damage to a bed and pillow.

Yep. I can easily punch through a wall.

A pillow, not so much.

True but I actually like the sense of passage conveyed by the existing title as you picture it closing in on the target.

Like that rock had a rough night and just wanted someplace soft to crash.

My thoughts as well and spent some time trying to think of how and details and it still don't seem to feel right.

Roof don't look substantial enough to slow something that size and dare say density enough for it to be finally stopped by a pillow. Then the entry marks, just don't feel right, given the speeds and also the temps, I'd expect some entry marks and in a way, a more cleaner hole perhaps. Then the aspect that it would still be hot and no pillow would be able to withstand the kinda heat it would still have.

Too much of this feels off, so be interesting how those tests come out.

Makes me wonder - how hard is it to fake a meteorite?

> Roof don't look substantial enough to slow something that size and dare say density enough for it to be finally stopped by a pillow

Why not? It was in free fall. Wouldn't a rock be similarly stopped?

> given the speeds and also the temps

What speeds? It would have slowed down to terminal velocity way before reaching the ground.

What temps? It should be pretty cold by then. The glowing red hot meteorite on the ground is a Hollywood invention.

> Makes me wonder - how hard is it to fake a meteorite?

Depends on who you want to fool. Researchers with access to equipment? No chance. News organizations? May not be that difficult.

> Then the aspect that it would still be hot

Nope. Not that hot. There's a debate on whether or not it will even be warm. Probably cool to the touch.

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/our-solar-system/75-our-sol...

Oh. I didn't think I would need to ever point to the 'is it a meteorite?' [0] flowchart. I guess how hard you have to fake depends on who you are convincing. Slag can fool your friends, but anyone who studies or collects meteorites will probably require some multi stage metallurgical process to convince.

[0] https://geoscience.unlv.edu/what-to-do-if-you-think-that-you...

I love the "did someone see it fall?".

Answer: YES Outcome: Not a meteorite

Looks like most of the force of the impact was absorbed by the rafter and then it deflected off into the room.

I'm assuming the last layer of ceiling it penetrated slowed it down enough. A pillow and bed can also absorb the shock better than something rigid.

I'd also assume that someone who is in shape can throw a rock hard enough that it penetrates dry wall easily, yet not penetrate a pillow. Similar amounts of energy were probably involved by the time the meteorite had entered the bedroom.

I don't think this is a "why" question.

Apparently it did have the right energy to crash through the roof but not damage the pillow.

Flexibility. A roof will apply substantial stopping force to a fast moving object over a very short distance until the roof breaks. (And bit more as the broken piece of roof accelerates.). A pillow or mattress will deform a lot without breaking, so the smaller stopping force will be applied over a much larger distance.

(Energy change = force times distance)

I met a guy who owned the Peekskill meteorite and the car which it hit it. He was/is a well known meteorite and Eurypterid dealer.

I read this and thought, “damn alien assassins can’t even pull off headshots anymore!” Good thing too, this lady got wicked lucky!

"The only good bug is a dead bug" - Starship Troopers

If, hypothetically, I wanted to defend myself from such meteors, what could I install in an attic?

live/move underground

A couple of meters of concrete probably. This might require a new house.

https://fortifiedestate.com/product/bullet-resistant-fibergl...

I hope that happens to me some day, I would immediately try to find out if it was a quasi-crystal!

What, and sacrifice a pillow? You savage.

I hope you have a dog to wake you up in time to save your head!

In the photos the meteorite is just sitting there.

Shouldn’t it have been extremely hot to burn the pillow?

Being the first recorded person to die from a falling meteor is one of my biggest fears.

Wake-up call from God.

This is why I must sleep with a helmet from now on.

So THIS is why dogs don't like fireworks.

Wait so the dog barking saved her life?

how is that meteor did not destroy her bed or at least put it all to the flame heated by the friction

Which friction? Friction with the air (or actually, compression of the air in front of the object, which is a much greater cause of heating) is how it sheds almost all its velocity in the upper atmosphere. Once it reaches terminal velocity, it doesn't heat up meaningfully by friction.

See also: "From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?" https://what-if.xkcd.com/28/

New thing to be afraid of.

Seems unlikely.

> She and an RCMP officer dispatched to investigate suspected it was debris from a construction site on nearby Highway 1

Conspiracy theory: Meteorites aren't real. It's all just debris. Construction companies bribe astronomers so that they won't face criminal charges.

What kind of construction site launches debris like that, maybe they are building trebuchets?

Meteorites are a conspiracy from Big Construction which in turn is a front for Big Trebuchet. We're through the looking glass here!

> Catapults are a great way to get somewhere fast

Elon Musk, June 11th 2020

Weirdly enough I live the next town from this one. The construction they're talking about is twinning up the highway which requires blasting out the mountain to make room for the road, so it's not to surprising they thought it could have come from there.

Yeh this didn't happen.

> Hamilton said she didn't tell anybody about what had happened for a few days while she absorbed the experience.

Sure!

Do you want Venom? Cause this is how we get Venom.

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