Reported in the London Daily Mail

When it says "Hot Rock" I smell a proverbial rat here. Meteorites, by the time they get down to around sea level are cold.

So Phil says anyway

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I wonder if it's really true, but it could be that the story itself is true, and the story about the smoking crater is just an error. I would assume that a meteorite would create a lot of dust, so it could be that the witness mistook dust for smoke. Or it could be that the reporter was being imaginative, i.e. the witness just said "crater" and the journalist assumed that meteorites leave smoking craters.

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As above, so below

You would think the first picture they'd have is of the crater. It'd be a lot more impressive than that fragment.

Wouldn't something that size be falling at terminal velocity, and hardly fast enough to make a blinding light and thunderclap?

Not saying it couldn't happen, but the evidence I see in the article sounds a bit embellished. Take for instance that car that got hit by a meteorite years ago, there was a picture of that damage, and it made sense.

Which means the 'journalist' had no idea what the speed was, anything from almost zero to 30,000 but suggesting the most interesting and most unlikely. One reading of the headline could be that the schoolboy was travelling at that speed. Serves him right, if he was.

30,000 mph?!? How is that possible?
I used the calculator on this NASA website. The big unknown for me is the drag coefficient. If I use their default value of 0.7, I'm hard pressed to get anything above about 1000 ft/sec (700 mph). If I drop it to 0.01, I get ~8000 ft/sec (5500 mph). Nothing close to 30,000 mph.

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This involves a use of the phrase 'direct hit' that only works in bold caps.

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Seems this is for real.
This newsflash just in 12 minutes ago: http://www.thetechherald.com/article...zing-meteorite
Google for "Gerrit Blank" and "meteorite", it's all over the web.
Doesn't make it true, but at least we have many sources.

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The BA is talking about it in his blog, and is asking all those Bad Astronomy questions.

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This actually happened to me in 1971. A 5 pound iron meteorite hit the ground two feet in front of me. Trust me, it was stone cold and it made only a srcape on the roadway. I kept hat thing for over twenty years as a reminder of mortality!

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Shock-Jock

An additional doubt:
Why would a crater in asphalt from such a small object be so wide and shallow?

I'd like to know where the 1 in 100 million comes from. How many people have been hit? They mention 4 deaths, but this number would mean that there would be one strike per person per year assuming around a 70 year lifetime. Sounds possible, but I don't know the basis.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Looking at the picture of the burn on the kids hand, there is something bothering me.

1) It Look like something was pressed up against his hand (or his hand pressed up against something. Skin begins to burn at about 55C (~130F) but that looks like it was seared so say around 200C(~400F). Most of the heat would have dissipated by the time it reached the surface. At most it would have been room temperature.

2) It looks like a burn that is a week old. The burn has scabbed and there is no reddening of the tissue around the burn. I've gotten burns similar to that pulling pans out of an oven or working on a car and touching the hot engine.

3) The angle that the burn is at for some reason it doesn't look right to me, it's completely inline with his hand.

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Ooooo, I think I thought a thought. Ooo I did, I did, I did think a thought.

If a meteor the size of a pea were to hit the ground with enough speed to create a foot-wide impact scar, that meteor would be totally obliterated, wouldn't it? And would that small a meteor be able to retain that much energy after falling through the atmosphere? As meteors fall through the atmosphere, they are also slowed by it; tiny meteors lose practically all of their kinetic energy before reaching the ground.

And if anyone needs a reason to question the reportage, check out some of the other headlines:

• Dyno the puppy survives after toddler flushes him down the toilet while washing him
• 
  Bugs found miles under Greenland ice are reawakened from a 120,000-year sleep

Supermarket tabloids online, awaken and conquer!

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But keep your feet both on the ground;
Sometimes the astronomy's bad.

You may see the cosmos through the noise,
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Remember when reading conspiracy ploys,
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Now that you mention it, I don't even have to see it. Even if the meteorite was thousands of degrees, how could it have contacted the skin long enough for the heat to penetrate the skin?

I think we owe it to Sticks to explain these things. It might be his only local source for news based on the stuff he's posted here. Poor fella.

They also don't know that "NASA" is an acronym. Although it seems "Another" is.

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Talk about a mis-quote ... the "bugs" are in fact extremely small microbes that needed to be incubated for 11 months. Here is the article I read on it: LiveScience.com

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Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

Ooooo, I think I thought a thought. Ooo I did, I did, I did think a thought.

You might be presuming that no manuals of style used by some publishers call for acronyms like Nasa to be written as normal words. Such is not uncommon in at least British usage, and perhaps adopted in many English-speaking parts of the world.

And you probably know, but the capitalized ANOTHER merely looks emphatic.

Wikipedia: Abbreviation :: United Kingdom

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

This one's actually true! Our local NBC affiliate picked it up, complete with a camera sent up the sewer pipe to get video of the puppy. (It is reported to be doing fine.)

Which doesn't change my thoughts regarding the subject of this thread. It doesn't sound plausible to me. Where are the Mythbusters when we need them?

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Where mainstream ideas can't be found,
some novel theories can be had.
But keep your feet both on the ground;
Sometimes the astronomy's bad.

You may see the cosmos through the noise,
But take care which path you choose.
Remember when reading conspiracy ploys,
A mind's a terrible thing to lose.

So keep your spider sense on high
And before they drive you to booze,
Take time to roll up your pant legs, boys,
It's too late to save your shoes.

Thanks, I never knew that one, even if I was familiar with a lot of British differences.

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As usual, there is no press follow up to the original story. I have a feeling that it is a hoax.

I would imagine that it is a hoax because something that is coming at you at 500 miles per second would most likely do more than just a 3 inch scar.

It wouldn't, because smaller meteoroids are braked down in the atmosphere until they just fall with the terminal velocity of a falling rock - about 150-250 mph.

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Mars Society.

But wouldn't leave a 1 foot smoking crater.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

From the blog:200 kph is terminal velocity for a human body with wings spread, a rock is faster. I'd imagine a rock going even that fast, hitting the asphalt, would create quite a crater, and the impact alone would create quite a bit of heat.

Asphalt pavement is very tough and it would be hard to make much of a crater at 200kph (normal Texas hwy. speeds. ).

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board!

Hmmm, I've made some craters in Texas asphalt just by driving over it.

However, I hadn't looked at the photo. Is that tiny pea supposed to be the perp?

Ok, now that I look at the photo, it really stinks of hoaxville. When you heat asphalt pavement it turns black. There is neither gray nor grey hot asphalt. Liquid asphalt is black and is pumpable at 250F. It will oxidize and will hang on to dust and other fine particles, which will turn the surface gray. Though asphalt pavement often only has about 5% to 6% asphalt (bitumen) it always looks black when it is laid at normal temperatures (250F to 350F). [Emulsion based asphalts will look brown until the water evaporates and then it is pitch (colorful pun) black.]

The BA may or may not have picked-ed up on this, but along with the odd shape for the so-called crater, the color seems very wrong to me.

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Lemme straighten you all out.

The speed quoted in the original post, 30,000mph, is a perfectly reasonable
speed for a meteoroid hitting Earth's atmosphere.

Terminal speed depends on the size, density and shape of the meteoroid.
As a rough approximation, we can ignore the shape as a relatively minor
factor. Size and density combine to give mass. So the terminal speed
depends on the mass, to a first approximation.

Whether a meteoroid reaches terminal speed depends on its speed when
it hits the atmosphere, its angle of entry, whether it stays in one piece or
breaks up, and how rapidly it ablates during entry (if it ablates at all).
The smallest micrometeoroids, a few tenths of a millimeter in diameter
and less, are stopped by the atmosphere so quickly that they don't heat
up enough to vaporize or even melt. They slowly drift downward, often
seeding cloud and raindrop formation.

Meteoroids large enough to make meteors but too small to reach the
ground burn up completely before reaching 50 kilometres. A typical
meteoroid a few millimetres in diameter makes a visible streak tens of
kilometres long in less than half a second.

Larger meteoroids typically lose 95% to 99% of their mass as they
enter the atmosphere. So a meteoroid which ends up as a 1 kilogram
meteorite on the ground must start out with a mass of close to 100 kg.
The meteor can look as bright as the Sun and last half a minute or more,
depending on the initial size, speed, angle of entry, and composition of
the meteoroid. It usually breaks apart or even explodes while still high in
the sky, in which case thousands of small pieces may fall to the ground.

Meteoroids large enough to survive entry generally either slow to terminal
speed or fragment and then slow to terminal speed before reaching 10 km.
Terminal speed of a large meteoroid in the lower atmosphere is about
100 to 250 metres per second -- less than the speed of sound. Once a
meteoroid has slowed to about three times the speed of sound, it stops
glowing and losing mass.

Meteoroids which are found soon after they fall are usually cold. The
surface heat has had time to dissipate by the time they are found.

Meteoroids of a few tens of grams have lower terminal speeds, which
means that they take a long time to reach the ground and thus have time
to cool before reaching the ground. However, even a cold piece of rock or
metal will feel very hot if it rubs across your skin at 20 metres per second.
You will get a friction burn nomatter how cold the material is.

A piece of rock or metal with a mass of only a few tens of grams moving
at 10 or 100 metres per second will not make a "crater" in asphalt. It will
most likely either dent the asphalt and bounce, or be embedded.

A kilogram-size piece moving at 100 to 250 metres per second would break
the asphalt if the asphalt is brittle. It would also likely break concrete.
Such an object would itself likely be broken into many small shards which
would fly out from the impact point at speeds comparable to the speed at
impact.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

It is pretty obvious that the media overdo it calling the blemish in the asphalt a "crater".

As for the temperature of freshly fallen meteorites: Shouldn't that depend on whether they break up when slowed down to almost terminal speed (the inner pieces would be cold to start with) or consume themselves because of high structural integrity (as in iron meteorites) so that the piece which reaches the ground is thoroughly heated? At 200 m/s, it takes the object just about a minute to cross the troposphere, not enough time to cool down if heated more than superficially, despite the windstream.

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Mars Society.

I wonder if they'll have difficulty adjusting to their new lives.

Now that it has been over two months since the incident. If it was a hoax it was not revealed in the press. As usual, the media's lack of long term memory strikes again.

I don't want to accuse anyone of wrongdoing without better evidence,
but as a speculation, I can imagine someone playing with a gun or some
other dangerous device that they know they are not allowed to touch,
and the thing fires but luckily the person gets only a vey superficial
wound. Maybe mom will believe me if I tell her I was hit by a meteor...

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves