Meteors, Meteorites and Impacts

A meteor is a bright streak of light in the sky (a "shooting star" or a "falling star") produced by the entry of a small meteoroid into the Earth's atmosphere. If you have a dark clear sky you will probably see a few per hour on an average night; during one of the annual meteor showers you may see as many as 100/hour. Very bright meteors are known as fireballs; if you see one please report it.

Meteor showers can be very impressive. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:


The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire-flags sheen,
To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between
And the coming wind did roar more loud,
And the sails did sigh like sedge;
And the rain poured down from one black cloud;
The Moon was at its edge

may have been inspired by the Leonid meteor shower that he witnessed in 1797.
Meteorites are bits of the solar system that have fallen to the Earth. Most come from asteroids, including few are believed to have come specifically from 4 Vesta; a few probably come from comets. A small number of meteorites have been shown to be of Lunar (23 finds) or Martian (22) origin.

One of the Martian meteorites, known as ALH84001 (left), is believed to show evidence of early life on Mars.

Though meteorites may appear to be just boring rocks, they are extremely important in that we can analyze them carefully in our labs. Aside from the few kilos of moon rocks brought back by the Apollo and Luna missions, meteorites are our only material evidence of the universe beyond the Earth.

A very large number of meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere each day amounting to more than a hundred tons of material. But they are almost all very small, just a few milligrams each. Only the largest ones ever reach the surface to become meteorites. The largest found meteorite (Hoba, in Namibia) weighs 60 tons.

The average meteoroid enters the atmosphere at between 10 and 70 km/sec. But all but the very largest are quickly decelerated to a few hundred km/hour by atmospheric friction and hit the Earth's surface with very little fanfare. However meteoroids larger than a few hundred tons are slowed very little; only these large (and fortunately rare) ones make craters.

A good example of what happens when a small asteroid hits the Earth is Barringer Crater (a.k.a. Meteor Crater) near Winslow, Arizona. It was formed about 50,000 years ago by an iron meteor about 30-50 meters in diameter. The crater is 1200 meters in diameter and 200 meters deep. About 120 impact craters have been identified on the Earth, so far (see below).

A more recent impact occurred in 1908 in a remote uninhabited region of western Siberia known as Tunguska. The impactor was about 60 meters in diameter and probably consisting of many loosely bound pieces. In contrast to the Barringer Crater event, the Tunguska object completely disintegrated before hitting the ground and so no crater was formed. Nevertheless, all the trees were flattened in an area 50 kilometers across. The sound of the explosion was heard half-way around the world in London.

There are probably at least 1000 asteroids larger than 1 km in diameter that cross the orbit of Earth. One of these hits the Earth about once in a million years or so on the average. Larger ones are less numerous and impacts are less frequent, but they do sometimes happen and with disastrous consequences.

The impact of a comet or asteroid about the size of Hephaistos or SL9 hitting the Earth was probably responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. It left a 180 km crater now buried below the jungle near Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula (right).

Calculations based on the observed number of asteroids suggest that we should expect about 3 craters 10 km or more across to be formed on the Earth every million years. This is in good agreement with the geologic record. It is more difficult to compute the frequency of larger impacts like Chicxulub but once per 100 million years seems like a reasonable guess