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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

That is one crazy story. I need to see this done in Hollywood graphics. They're claiming the asteroid came in so low that it did a flyby of the Levant, igniting any flammable object or person on its way, and slammed into the side of a mountain in the Alps

It's definitely not what I normally picture when I think about asteroids.

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In a movie, I'd definitely involve Ötzi as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi). Ötzi was found like 30 km from the impact site. And could have been a contemporary. E.g., he cursed the guy who shot him and whose village is struck by a meteor in the end.

The plot thickens: a commenter here posted this link, which indicates Ötzi might have been roped in to this story in quite an imaginative way:

"Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians or to explain the death of the Iceman as a human sacrifice to prevent a nuclear winter after the impact."

http://historyofgeology.fieldofscience.com/2011/04/landslide...

Unfortunately the sciforums link to discussion of the pseudoscientists is dead

Ötzi and his killers might have been up there looking for the impact site, there might have been a mad rush to find the impact, they might have seen it as some sort of holy item worth killing for.

There was after all a sun cult in Europe at this time.

And we have recovered an iron dagger made from a meteorite in the 14th century BCE. So this phenomenon of tracking a meteorite impact site and finding it might go much further back in human history.

Hrm. Maybe. Though I have to wonder from how far afar, considering the energy of this thing. Be it scorched by its heat, blinded by its light, or ruptured lungs from the sonic boom it must have made over a long and wide track, leaving not that many survivors in that track. Try to find a 'best of' of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor from 2013 on YT, or elsewhere, and watch what that little thing did.

Some witnesses are speaking of the heat they felt on their faces.

Now compare the size of that thing which is assumed to be schoolbus-like at the most, with what's assumed for the 'Köfels impact'. I think it was about one kilometer.

Ouch!

Presumably none of the meteor hunters would have seen it themselves. They did have a network of trade, as well as information in those days.

You have it backwards.

It came in fast and in a flat angle from somewhere up in the Arctic, over what is now the North Sea, over what is now Germany, and smashed into/grazed the northern side of what is now the 'Gamskogel' near 'Köfels' in the Alps in Austria. The resulting cloud of glowing white hot stuff got almost ejected back into space, and mostly stayed on course North->South by inertia, sending it over the Adriatic Sea, radiating heat downwards in the process. Some of it impacted in the Levante in multiple places, some far apart, over several hours.

Skyfall!1!!

A six degree angle?! That's insane. I never considered that as a possibility.

It is not as likely as some of the others but still more likely than five or four... it all depends on what you started out with.

Very perspicacious remark that it's more likely than five or four... are you an astronautical engineer by any chance?

But I'm wondering about such shallow angles - wouldn't it bounce off the atmosphere or somesuch? Perhaps it's just about possible somehow: just imagine firing a kilometre of rock from a mountain at a six degree angle with enough velocity to get it into orbit, but in reverse.

At some point it might but that would depend highly on the speed of the object relative to us....

Tunguska must have been just too steep because it left a very long track and likely did not even impact.

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

At Mach 80 a lot of things that seem compressible are not... so yes, once you get to angles like that at some point it would possibly deflect but the energy dissipated will still be massive and the shockwave will be ringing the whole planet.

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