Asteroid the 'Size of a Minivan' Exploded over California | Hacker News Reader

Asteroid the 'Size of a Minivan' Exploded over California

news.discovery.com

43 pointspwg15 comments

It looks like Scott Adams was lucky enough to see this asteroid too!

http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/gods_matchbox/

Thanks for sharing.

For the author of this blog post:

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I'm not a fan of using kilotons of TNT as a scale. The average reader has no frame of reference for this measurement.

You're right. They should use terajoules. :)

Heh.

I was going to suggest a percentage of Hiroshima explosion, but I realize this is a sensitive subject. It bothers me, however, when articles describe an explosion as "X kilos of TNT" and follow that up with "approximately X atom bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima." The Hiroshima part is likely what most readers will relate with.

Granting the high level of speculation involved, but with any frequency wouldn't these sorts of things be quite the wildfire hazard? Or is the impact and subsequent disintegration and boring of the object negate any heat/fire? Yes, I'm clueless.

Sure, but relative to the risk of wildfire due to lightning these sorts of events contribute only a tiny amount.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongu_meteor

But that one was something like 100 to 1000 times larger.

They dont have enough heat to start fires generally. They are cold from their travel through space and the outer layer that does heat up on reentry tends to ablate leaving a core that is cold to warm on impact.

This happens all the time. Only a matter of time until one big enough land on earths surface.

For me, Discovery is not a reliable source for science news. Way too much... sensationalist, to say the least.

Must be Google's fault. I thought they would be more careful with their mining operation.

Quite disturbing that there was no warning of this.

It was a pretty small meteor as these things go. They are virtually impossible to detect ahead of time.

But since it's small, it's also not dangerous. The dangerous ones are larger - and also easier to see. So that works out in our favor.

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